A novel 3D constellation-masked method for physical security in hierarchical OFDMA system

This paper proposes a novel 3D constellation-masked method to ensure the physical security in hierarchical optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) system. The 3D constellation masking is executed on the two levels of hierarchical modulation and among different OFDM subcarriers, which is realized by the masking vectors. The Lorenz chaotic model is adopted for the generation of masking vectors in the proposed scheme. A 9.85 Gb/s encrypted hierarchical QAM OFDM signal is successfully demonstrated in the experiment. The performance of illegal optical network unit (ONU) with different masking vectors is also investigated. The proposed method is demonstrated to be secure and efficient against the commonly known attacks in the experiment.