Novel Synchronous Time-domain Spectral Phase Encoding/Decoding Scheme for Secured Optical Communication

In this paper, we propose a novel synchronous time-domain spectral phase encoding/decoding (SPED) scheme for secured optical communication. The pulse generator generates short optical pulses at data-rate, the SPE consists of a pair of dispersive components with opposite dispersion values (+D and -D) to stretch/compress the optical pulse and a phase modulator (PM) or a hybrid intensity/phase modulator (IM/PM) for data and OC modulation. The spectral phase decoding (SPD) is similar to the SPE with a PM synchronously driven by OC (the complementary pattern of OC) at a repetition rate equal to the data-rate. The OCs thus can be rapidly reconfigured even bit-by-bit to enhance the system confidentiality.