An optical code-division multiple access (OCDMA) scheme based on cyclic shift extension of a base code is proposed to enable asynchronous multi-user optical wireless communications for very populated scenarios. This multiple access method is convenient for low–medium data rate communications of a large number of simultaneous transmitters. An expression to obtain a tight upper bound of the bit-error probability of the new scheme is provided which is also confirmed by experimental results. A variant of the proposed communication method which allows the encoding of several bits per symbol is also presented, although its analysis demonstrates that the first simpler strategy reaches similar performance with a significantly lower receiver complexity.
