Simplified coherent chaotic optical secure communication scheme based on the Kramers–Kronig receiver

Abstract

Enhancing physical layer encryption in fiber-optic networks remains a challenging yet vital task. In this Letter, we propose a simplified coherent chaotic secure optical communication scheme based on the Kramers–Kronig (KK) receiver. This scheme incorporates a semiconductor laser with a phase-conjugated optical feedback serving as a common chaotic source, and its chaotic output is directly injected into the two slave lasers arranged separately at the transmitter and receiver end to achieve high-quality synchronization of chaotic signals, with a corresponding chaotic bandwidth of 30.6 GHz. By virtue of the common-signal-induced broad chaotic synchronization, a proof-of-principle demonstration is successfully conducted. It involves the secure transmission of a 20 Gbaud 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) signal over a 50 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) link. At the receiver end, we deploy a KK receiver to reconstruct the field of the optical signal and hence enable signal compensation and recovery with offline digital signal processing (DSP). This method simplifies device requirements in the current chaotic coherent optical secure communication, offering a cost-effective mode and promising path for advancing physical layer encryption in inter-data center communications.