Numerical and experimental investigation of a dispersive optoelectronic oscillator for chaotic time-delay signature suppression

Abstract

Chaos generation from a novel single-loop dispersive optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) with a broadband chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) is numerically and experimentally investigated. The CFBG has much broader bandwidth than the chaotic dynamics such that its dispersion effect rather than filtering effect dominates the reflection. The proposed dispersive OEO exhibits chaotic dynamics when sufficient feedback strength is guaranteed. Suppression of chaotic time-delay signature (TDS) is observed as the feedback strength increases. The TDS can be further suppressed as the amount of grating dispersion increases. Without compromising bandwidth performance, our proposed system extends the parameter space of chaos, enhances the robustness to modulator bias variation, and improves TDS suppression by at least five times comparing to the classical OEO. Experimental results qualitatively agree well with numerical simulations. In addition, the advantage of dispersive OEO is further verified by experimentally demonstrating random bit generation with tunable rate up to 160 Gbps.