COHERENT OPTICAL CDMA NETWORKS

Recent work in optical code division multiple access (CDMA) is reviewe d, progressing from incoherent to coherent techniques. It is shown tha t under appropriate conditions, coherent CDMA can in principle rival w avelength-division multiplexing (WDM) in terms of aggregate network th roughput. Furthermore it is shown that at high data rates, some of the components for WDM and coherent CDMA networks are nearly identical, i ndicating a similarity between the two approaches. CDMA retains a codi ng aspect which may prove attractive in security applications.