Chaotic communication in radio-over-fiber (ROF) system based on optoelectronic feedback (OEF) semiconductor laser is studied numerically. Performance of different message encoding schemes, including additive chaotic modulation (ACM) and on-off shift keying (OOSK), are compared. By taking into account the attenuation, nonlinearity, dispersion, and amplifier spontaneous emission noise in the fiber module and the path loss, additive white Gaussian noise, and multipath effect in the wireless channel, system performance including quality factor Q and bit-error-rate for different transmission lengths and message bit-rates are investigated. While both schemes are possible to achieve a BER < 10^-9 of the benchmark set by the conventional communication, we have demonstrated that the OOSK scheme is better suitable for long distance RoF transmission. On the contrary, while the ACM scheme is sensitive to the perturbation in the wireless channel, it shows moderate decoding results in the fiber-only scenario. In this paper, effects of parameters mismatch between the synchronized transmitter and receiver lasers and the security of this communication system are also addressed.

Date Published: 13 February 2007
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6457, Free-Space Laser Communication Technologies XIX and Atmospheric Propagation of Electromagnetic Waves, 64570G (13 February 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.698265

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6457:
Free-Space Laser Communication Technologies XIX and Atmospheric Propagation of Electromagnetic Waves
Steve Mecherle; Olga Korotkova, Editor(s)