Design of a secure Multi-Carrier DCSK system

This paper presents a secure Multi-Carrier Differential Chaos Shift Keying (MC-DCSK) system. This hybrid of MC modulation and DCSK is aimed at combining the height data rate, the simplified equalization in multipath propagation, the robustness to impulse noise, and the security of transmission coming from the use of chaotic signals in digital communications. In this paper, we describe the proposed transmitter and receiver, including the chaotic modulation used in a single input, single output system, and then we evaluate the potential benefits of the MC-DCSK. To increase security, a spreading and interleaving in time and frequency are used to break the similarity between the reference and the data samples of the DCSK signal. The performance of the MC-DCSK is evaluated under a fading communication channel, and without equalization on the receiver side. An approach for computing the bit-error-rate (BER) performance is provided, and an analytical BER expression is derived. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of our performance computation approach.