ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews many of the proposed and demonstrated applications of optical code-division multiple access (CDMA) techniques that have been studied over the past few decades. It provides some of the novel architectures that have been proposed for interconnecting nodes using optical CDMA and their advantages for transmission in both fiber and free space. The chapter discusses local area networks (LAN) applications over distributed network architectures as a main feature of CDMA. It presents the advantages CDMA offers to connection-oriented and broadcast-based data sources such as video and multimedia transmission. Many proposed and demonstrated optical CDMA systems have targeted high bandwidth, multiuser local area networks (LANs) as a key driving application and use for the technology. Optical CDMA networking techniques possess many of the same advantages that the original designers of Ethernet had in mind during the formulation of the first carrier sense multiple access and collision detect protocols for shared media.
