Adaptive synchronization of chaotic systems and its application to secure communications

This paper addresses the adaptive synchronization problem of the drive–driven type chaotic systems via a scalar transmitted signal. Given certain structural conditions of chaotic systems, an adaptive observer-based driven system is constructed to synchronize the drive system whose dynamics are subjected to the system’s disturbances and/or some unknown parameters. By appropriately selecting the observer gains, the synchronization and stability of the overall systems can be guaranteed by the Lyapunov approach. Two well-known chaotic systems: Rössler-like and Chua’s circuit are considered as illustrative examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Moreover, as an application, the proposed scheme is then applied to a secure communication system whose process consists of two phases: the adaptation phase in which the chaotic transmitter’s disturbances are estimated; and the communication phase in which the information signal is transmitted and then recovered on the basis of the estimated parameters. Simulation results verify the proposed scheme’s success in the communication application.