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.

A key element in the CDMA transmission is DS spreading. Spreading in a DS/SSMA system are provided in two categories-synchronization and data. For synchronization sequences, good auto-correlation and cross-correlation properties are required in order to guarantee fast acquistion with a minimum false alarm probability. On the other hand, the auto-correlation property may not be so important in data spreading since synchronization is obtained by synchronization spreading. In this paper we provide a set of synchronization sequences and a set of data sequences--each a set of binary N-tuples--that have the necessary correlation constraints.