Investigation of all-optical switching OCDMA testbed under the influence of chromatic dispersion and timing jitter

First part of this paper presents an all-optical switching OCDMA testbed investigation under the influence of the residual chromatic dispersion resulted from different locations of the receiving terminal. The investigation was carried out using incoherent 2D-WH/TS OCDMA codes based on picosecond pulses at OC-48 (2.5Gb/s) data rate. The testbed itself is based on a fully chromatic dispersion compensated (with sub-picosecond accuracy) 17 km bidirectional fiber link connecting University of Strathclyde and Glasgow University. We have found that a high performance penalty in the form of BER deterioration was incurred when even a relatively short length of optical fiber was added to a fully compensated transmission link in order to relocate the receiving terminal (we tested increments up to 275m of SMF-28). Second part of this paper reports on the testbed performance when an OCDMA receiver with built in all-optical clock recovery was implemented to mitigate the detrimental effects of the link timing jitter on the picosecond switching based all-optical time gate.