Design and demonstration of a novel optical CDMA platform for use in avionics applications

We designed, built, and demonstrated a highly scalable incoherent optical CDMA platform under DARPA contract which was delivered to Lockheed Martin for additional testing in avionic applications. The platform enables users to communicate with each other at ∼1.25 Gbit/s per user with raw BER of less than 10⁻¹². The system architecture uses (3, 11) fast wavelength-hopping, time-spreading prime codes with a chip size of 73 ps utilizing picosecond optical pulses allocated in the time and wavelength domains. A novel design of a “dual code” optical encoder and decoder realized a novel optical layer implementation of an XOR gate and enabled secure network connectivity using a “One-time pad” encryption approach. The testbed is also designed to conduct eavesdropping studies on testbed users. The incoherent OCDMA approach is compatible with existing DWDM optical networks and uses off-the-shelf components.