USING ADVANCED OPTICAL MULTIPLE-ACCESS TECHNIQUES IN HIGH-SPEED AVIONIC LOCAL-AREA NETWORKS FOR FUTURE AIRCRAFT APPLICATIONS .1. OPTICAL CODE-DIVISION MULTIPLE-ACCESS NETWORKS

In the first part of this paper, we propose high-speed fiber optic cod e-division multiple-access (CDMA) local area networks (LANs) for futur e real-time on-board command and control communications in aircrafts. We give new design concepts to implement avionic LANs which use optica l CDMA schemes with a full tunability and can support sensor data dist ribution and computer interconnects. Reliable short-pulse generation a nd optical sampling are presented to optical CDMA transmitters to faci litate the application of avionic LANs. Optical architectures for fast ly tunable CDMA encoders and correlators using prime codes are given. Their simple delay control logic is described, and it can be easily pe rformed by using optical fiber delay lines. Moreover, the power losses of all-optical CDMA encoders and correlators are analyzed. Topologies for avionic fiber optic CDMA LANs are also discussed. We show that op tical CDMA can be used in an avionic LAN to support high-speed paralle l data communications with a low latency and multiple connections with a very fast reconfiguration time. This in turn can ensure real-time o n-board command and control communications for future high-performance aircraft applications. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.