AbstractDue to various desirable features of optical code division multiple access (OCDMA), it is believed this technique once developed and commercially available will be an integral part of optical access networks. Optical CDMA system suffers from a problem called multiple access interference (MAI) which limits the number of active users, it occurs when number of active users share the same carriers. The aim of this paper is to review successive interference cancellation (SIC) scheme based on optical CDMA system. The paper also reviews the system performance in presence of shot noise, thermal noise, and phase–induced intensity noise (PIIN). A comprehensive review on the mathematical model of SIC scheme using direct detection (DS) and spectral amplitude coding (SAC) were presented in this article.