Key space enhancement of optical chaos secure communication: chirped FBG feedback semiconductor laser

Optical chaos communication has advantages of high speed and long transmission distance. Unfortunately, the key space of the traditional transceiver, i.e. semiconductor laser with mirror feedback, is limited due to the time delay signature. In this paper, we propose and numerically demonstrate a key space enhancement by using semiconductor laser with optical feedback from a chirped fiber Bragg grating (FBG). The chirped FBG feedback can make feedback delay a key parameter by eliminating the time delay signature. Moreover, the grating dispersion and center frequency can also be used as new keys. As a result, the dimension of key space is increased. By taking a bidirectional communication scheme as an example, numerical results show that the key space is raised by 2⁴⁴ times as against mirror feedback with a data rate of 2.5 Gb/s and a coupling strength of 0.447. As the coupling strength decreases, the key space increases due to the fact that chaos synchronization becomes more sensitive to parameter mismatch.