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Low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is shown to significantly outperform LDPC coded on-off keying (OOK) over the atmospheric turbulence channel in terms of both coding gain and spectral efficiency. In the regime of strong turbulence at a bit-error rate of 10(-5), the coding gain improvement of the LDPC coded single-side band unclipped-OFDM system with 64 sub-carriers is larger than the coding gain of the LDPC coded OOK system by 20.2 dB for quadrature-phase-shift keying (QPSK) and by 23.4 dB for binary-phase-shift keying (BPSK).

A maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) symbol decoding supplemented with iterative decoding is proposed as an effective mean for suppression of intrachannel nonlinearities. The MAP detector, based on Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv algorithm, operates on the channel trellis, a dynamical model of intersymbol interference, and provides soft-decision outputs processed further in an iterative decoder. A dramatic performance improvement is demonstrated. The main reason is that the conventional maximum-likelihood sequence detector based on Viterbi algorithm provides hard-decision outputs only, hence preventing the soft iterative decoding. The proposed scheme operates very well in the presence of strong intrachannel intersymbol interference, when other advanced forward error correction schemes fail, and it is also suitable for 40 Gb/s upgrade over existing 10 Gb/s infrastructure.

Optical Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OOFDM) is shown to outperform RZ-OOK transmission in high-speed optical communications systems in terms of transmission distance and spectral efficiency. The OOFDM in combination with the subcarrier multiplexing offers a significant improvement in spectral efficiency of at least 2.9 bits/s/Hz.

We evaluate the use of edge-illuminated holographic Bragg filters formed in phenanthrenequinone-doped poly(methyl methacrylate) for optical-code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) coding and decoding applications. Experimental cascaded Bragg filters are formed to select two different wavelengths with a fixed distance between the gratings and are directly coupled to a fiber-measurement system. The configuration and tolerances of the cascaded gratings are shown to be practical for time-wavelength OCDMA applications.