1 Gb/s chaotic encoded W-band wireless transmission for physical layer data confidentiality in radio-over-fiber systems

Physical layer encryption methods are emerging as effective, low-latency approaches to ensure data confidentiality in wireless networks. The use of chaotic signals for data masking is a potential solution to prevent a possible eavesdropper to distinguish between noise and sensitive data. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate the W-band wireless transmission of a 1 Gb/s chaotic signal over 2 m in a radio-over-fiber architecture. The chaos encoding scheme is based on the transition between different states of a Duffing oscillator system, digitally implemented. The bit error rate achieved in all cases was below the forward error correction limit for 7 % overhead. The presented results validate the proposed chaos-based physical layer encoding solution for gigabit data transmissions in hybrid millimeter-wave/photonic networks.