Performance analysis of an asynchronous multi-user communication system for optical networks

In optically routed networks, information for verifying network configuration is not readily available in electronic form. To address this problem, a low-cost all-digital system was developed in [1], [2] for overlaying a low-rate management data channel on a high-rate payload data channel. In this work, we analyze the performance of this novel multi-user communication system under chip-level asynchronism, extending a previous analysis under chip-level synchronism. Two decoding strategies are investigated: a zero-forcing and a minimum mean-squared error detector. Fundamental tradeoffs among several system parameters are identified.