Bounds and Constructions for Two‐Dimensional Variable‐Weight Optical Orthogonal Codes

Optical orthogonal codes (1D constant‐weight OOCs or 1D CWOOCs) were first introduced by Salehi as signature sequences to facilitate multiple access in optical fibre networks. In fiber optic communications, a principal drawback of 1D CWOOCs is that large bandwidth expansion is required if a big number of codewords is needed. To overcome this problem, a two‐dimensional (2D) (constant‐weight) coding was introduced. Many optimal 2D CWOOCs were obtained recently. A 2D CWOOC can only support a single QoS (quality of service) class. A 2D variable‐weight OOC (2D VWOOC) was introduced to meet multiple QoS requirements. A 2D VWOOC is a set of 0, 1 matrices with variable weight, good auto, and cross‐correlations. Little is known on the construction of optimal 2D VWOOCs. In this paper, new upper bound on the size of a 2D VWOOC is obtained, and several new infinite classes of optimal 2D VWOOCs are obtained.