Error Analysis of a Digital Message Impaired by Optical Chaos

In this letter, we numerically investigate the statistical properties of the optical chaos hiding a digital message in secure transmission schemes. It is found that even if chaos statistics are usually not Gaussian, the statistics of the residual chaos, over the extracted message, are nearly Gaussian. Thus, assessing the bit-error rate from the Q parameter, as it is often done in the numerical analysis of such schemes, is a viable approach.