Applications of multirate optical fibre code-division-multiplexing systems to high-speed data communications for air traffic control

Abstract

Future air traffic control will be based on the distributed processing environment. This leads to the use of high-speed optical fibre networks and systems to connect many processors (for both general and specific purposes) and workstations in the air traffic control centres. To efficiently support such applications, communication systems should be capable of multirate operations. To achieve this aim, we propose an efficient optical fibre code-division multiplexing (OF-CDM) technique that can support multirate data communications without any increase of system complexity when compared with the equal-rate operation case. Unlike conventional optical orthogonal codes (OOCs), the use of our proposed unequal-length OOCs can eliminate any possible violation of the minimum cross-and auto-correlation constraint (i.e. ‘1’) in multirate OF-CDM systems. Thus, using unequal-length OOCs can achieve a better bandwidth efficiency and a lower bit error rate for multirate transmissions than employing conventional OOCs. Moreover, we present the design of cost-effective OF-CDM transmitters for multirate data transmissions. The proposed systems can be also employed to support future airborne real-time data distributions and computer interconnects.