Different signature codes in an optical code division multiple access (CDMA) network have been known to demonstrate different performances. The performance of different signature codes in an optical CDMA network was analyzed here in this paper by including the performance evaluation for the synchronization process which was not considered previously. Both auto- and cross-correlation properties of the signature codes were found to be important. In addition, the performance comparison of (n, w1, 1, 1), (n, w2, 2, 1) optical orthogonal codes (OOC's), and (n, w3, w3, 1) extended prime code demonstrated that an (n, w2, 2, 1) OOC could accommodate more users than the other two.

In this paper, we propose a spread spectrum pulse position modulation (SS-PPM) system, and describe its basic performances. In direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) systems, pseudo-noise (PN) matched filters are often used as information demodulation devices. In the PN matched filter demodulation systems, for simple structure and low cost of each receiver, it is desired that each demodulator uses only one PN matched filter, and that signals transmitted from each transmitter are binary. In such systems, on-off keying (SS-OOK), binary-phase-shift keying (SS-BPSK) and differential phase-shift keying (SS-DPSK) have been conventionally used. As one of such systems, we propose the SS-PPM system; the SS-PPM system is divided into the following two systems: 1) the SS-PPM system without sequence inversion keying (SIK) of the spreading code (Without SIK for short); 2) the SS-PPM system with SIK of the spreading code (With SIK for short). As a result, we show that under the same bandwidth and the same code length, the data transmission rate of the SS-PPM system is superior to that of the other conventional SS systems, and that under the same band-width, the same code length and the same data transmission rate, the SS-PPM system is superior to the other conventional SS systems on the following points: 1) Single channel bit error rate (BER) (BER characteristics of the SS-PPM system improve with increasing the number of chip slots of the SS-PPM system, and as the number of chip slots increases, it approaches Shannon's limit); 2) Asynchronous CDMA BER; 3) Frequency utilization efficiency. In addition, we also show that With SIK is superior to Without SIK on these points.