Prime codes are excellent candidates for use in multiwavelength optical code-division multiple-access (O-CDMA) systems. We show that in an O-CDMA system using two-dimensional single-pulse-per-row codes, a single choice of the number of wavelength channels can. accommodate different numbers of users with maximal spectral efficiency. The optimum single-user-detection spectral efficiency of the system can be reached using AND detection. A fixed-hardware network can readily be adapted in response to changes in the number of users and traffic load.

A universal scheme is developed to reproduce the effect of bipolar signaling in a unipolar optical channel. Without any hardware modification, the electro-optic/opto-electronic (EOE) system proposed enables the transmission of any bipolar code sequence through the unipolar optical channel while maintaining the correlation properties of the codes. The bit error rate performance of the EOE system is shown to be identical to that of an optimal baseband bipolar phase shift keying code-division multiple access (CDMA) system. Hence, the maximum spectral efficiency of an incoherent optical CDMA system using bipolar codes is the same as that of an optimal bipolar baseband CDMA system.