High-speed chaos-based secure optical communications over 130-km multi-core fiber

Area of Science:

• Optics and Photonics
• Secure Communications
• Fiber Optics

Background:

• High-speed and long-distance chaotic optical communication remains challenging.
• Existing methods struggle to meet demands for secure data transmission over extended ranges and high bandwidths.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel approach for high-speed and long-distance chaotic optical communication.
• To enhance aggregate transmission capacity within a single fiber using advanced multiplexing techniques.

Main Methods:

• Utilized mutual injection of semiconductor lasers for signal encryption and decryption.
• Employed space-division multiplexing (SDM) across all seven core channels of a multi-core fiber (MCF).

Main Results:

• Successfully demonstrated secure chaotic optical communication with 70-Gbps on-off keying (OOK) and 140-Gbps quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signals.
• Achieved transmission over a 130-km MCF with favorable performance, validating the proposed system.

Conclusions:

• The proposed method effectively overcomes limitations in high-speed, long-distance chaotic optical communication.
• This demonstration paves the way for ultrahigh capacity and ultra-long distance secure optical networks by leveraging spatial dimensions.