Despite their attractive features, free-space optical (FSO) communications suffer from several challenges in practical deployment; the major of them is fading or scintillation. To overcome such limitations, multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and cooperative techniques have been proposed. Although the promising effects of cooperative transmissions in radio frequency (RF) communications have greatly been investigated, there have not been remarkable researches on cooperative transmissions in FSO communications. In this study, the authors consider a relay-assisted FSO communication and investigate the outage performance of two well-known cooperative protocols, namely amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF), for this communication system. By a new definition of the order of diversity, the authors derive an analytical expression for the performance comparison of different cooperative and non-cooperative protocols. The authors also evaluate the performance of a FSO communication with two transmitter telescopes (MIMO systems) and compare its outage probability with those of cooperation strategies. The authors investigate the best place for the relay for both the AF and DF strategies and show that relay-assisted techniques can be used for FSO communication to achieve spatial diversity. Their performance can surpass that of the two-transmitter case by properly choosing the location of the relay.

A multistage decoder for the internally convolutionally coded fibre-optic time-hopping code division multiple access system recently introduced is considered. In this system, the decoder consists of several stages. The first stage is implemented using one of the single-user decoders introduced. The following stages are maximum likelihood (ML) decoders each of which use the decisions made by the previous stage. The performance of the proposed decoder is evaluated by a Monte Carlo simulation. Numerical results show that a multistage decoder with only two stages greatly outperforms the single-stage decoder with negligible increase in complexity. The authors also derive the Chernoff bound for the ML decoder with known interference, which is the ultimate performance of the multistage decoder.

In part I, a new internally coded time hoping optical code division multiple access (TH/OCDMA) scheme for fiber optic communication systems has been proposed and its multiple access performance has been evaluated using optical orthogonal code (OOC). Due to low cardinality of OOCs with a correlation value of 1, the capability of the proposed scheme could not be utilized effectively for an increasing number of simultaneous users. In this part, we consider applying the internally coded technique introduced in part one to the frame time hopping/OCDMA scheme. We evaluate the multiple access performance of the system for the three detectors introduced in part I. Our results demonstrate the capability of the internally coded TH/CDMA scheme to substantially increase the maximum number of simultaneous users when using FTH codes instead of OOCs.

In this paper, a new internally coded time-hopping optical code-division multiple-access (TH/OCDMA) scheme for fiber-optic communication systems is proposed, and its multiple-access performance is evaluated using optical orthogonal codes (OOCs). In the proposed method, the duration of each bit is divided into Nsframes, each one containing L chips. Two signature codes, namely, one pseudonoise (PN) sequence and one OOC, are assigned to each user. During each bit interval, based on the output of an channel encoder and the user's dedicated PN sequence, one of the Nsframes is selected, in which W pulses are transmitted in W chips, marked by the user's OOC. We consider three detectors at the receiver front end, namely, correlation, soft chip-level, and hard chip-level detectors. We evaluate the multiple-access performance of the system for each detector considering the effects of shot noise, dark current, and thermal noise. We compare the results with those obtained for the conventional OCDMA systems. Our numerical results indicate that, for the same bit rate and bandwidth, our proposed method substantially outperforms the conventional OCDMA system. Our results also show that the soft chip-level detector outperforms the other detection techniques in all cases considered