All-optical clock recovery for OCDMA systems with optical time gating

Implementing time gating in ultra-high speed OCDMA networks over long distance transmissions will require precise synchronization in order to suppress the influence of timing jitter on the OCDMA receiver. To implement optical gating, an optical clock is needed to control a switching window i.e., “a time gate” to pass the desired autocorrelation peak while blocking the MAI noise. We demonstrate that the use of a network global clock distribution is not necessary if the receiver synchronization is done via optical clock recovery. In our experimental demonstration a wider eye opening with power budget improvement of ∼7.5 dB was achieved when using all-optical clock recovery compare to clock distribution.