Novel results on the coexistence of spectrally phase-encoded OCDMA and DWDM

We propose and experimentally validate a novel method for transmitting several OCDMA channels in the unused bandwidth of a single WDM channel, thus allowing the OCDMA and SONET signals to share the same WDM channel. The theoretical justification of this new modulation scheme is based on a powerful property of spectrally phase-encoded OCDMA signals which is reported and proved for the first time: the operation of spectral phase encoding allows us to convey broadband signals over a disjoint (non-contiguous) frequency support. Remarkably, this property' does not impair signal orthogonality' so that it can be exploited both in synchronous and asynchronous OCDMA.