Future airborne optical fiber communication networks with single‐wavelength and multi‐wavelength code‐division multiple access techniques

Abstract

AbstractWe design optical fiber code‐division multiple‐access (CDMA) networks to support future airborne high‐speed communication services (e.g., real‐time command and control communications). The proposed airborne communication networks have a full tunability and a fast reconfiguration time. This can support real‐time sensor data distribution and computer interconnects. Architectures for fastly tunable optical CDMA encoders and correlators using prime codes are presented, and their simple delay control logic is described, which can be easily performed by using optical fiber delay lines. Moreover, multi‐wavelength optical CDMA networks using a multi‐star topology are designed. It is shown that the use of multi‐wavelength OCDMA not only can reduce the power loss of encoders/correlators and the bandwidth expansion of optical CDMA, but also can separate avionics subsystems into groups according to different traffic requirements and data rates. This in turn can efficiently integrate several networks with different data rates and number of users into a single‐fiber network by using wavelength‐division multiplexing scheme, and new avionics subsystems can be feasibly added to such a single‐fiber network by assigning, for example, new wavelengths or additional optical CDMA codewords to facilitate future aircraft applications.