Effect of Polarization Mode Dispersion on the BER Performance of Optical CDMA

In this paper, impact of polarization mode dispersion (PMD) on the bit error rate (BER) performance of direct sequence optical code division multiple access with in-line optical amplifiers is analytically investigated. Intensity modulation direct detection technique is employed in optical correlator receiver. Optical orthogonal codes are used as address sequence. The system BER performance is determined in presence of PMD and different noises induced from receiver, optical amplifiers, and multiple access interference. The power penalty suffered by the system is evaluated at BER of 10. It is found that the BER performance of the proposed system degraded more at high chip rate, chirp parameter and long fiber length due to the effect of PMD. Further, the BER performance of the proposed system is studied in presence of PMD compensation with frequency advanced higher order PMD vectors. The results demonstrate that the system BER performance is improved significantly for a particular fiber length and third-order PMD compensation technique shows better performance compared to first-, and second-order compensations.