Effect of imperfect slot synchronization on direct-detection optical synchronous CDMA communication systems with PPM signaling

Effect of imperfect slot synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver on optical synchronous code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems using pulse position modulation as data modulation (PPM/CDMA) is investigated. Optical orthogonal codes (OOC's) are employed as signature sequences, and parallel optic-fiber delay line encoders and correlators are adopted in the transmitters and the receivers, respectively. The upper bound on the bit error probability of PPM/CDMA is derived under the condition that the receiver slot timing shifts from the transmitter timing clock. The bit error probability performance is evaluated for some values of the number of slots per frame, average signal photocount, and the number of simultaneous users. It is shown that as the number of slots per frame increases, the timing offset should be restricted to be smaller to achieve low bit error probability. Further, when the timing offset is small, the improvement of the bit error probability performance with the increase of the number of slots per frame under the photocount per second constraint is shown to be larger than that under the photocount per symbol constraint.