Chaotic optical phase generated by electro-optic and optoelectronic nonlinear and nonlocal delayed feedback: Successful field experiment at 10 Gb/s

International audienceWe report on very recent achievements in optical chaos communications. Electro-optic phase modulation principles have been used to design a new chaos generator based on nonlinear delay dynamics. A multiple delay (both short and long) architecture allowed for an enhanced chaotic complexity, as well as a more accurate synchronization capability, over the full bandwidth of a typical 10 Gb/s binary message. Laboratory and field experiments proved the efficiency of the setup at that bit rate, demonstrating the supriority of the proposed orginal approach for practical high speed optical communications secured at the physical layer. The setup is also flexible to allow for the definition of hardware key defining the physical parameters ruling the dynamics, and which knowledge is conditional to the proper decoding. Additional variations of the setup is proposed in order to offer a higher security degree through the increase of the analogue processing occuring in the chaos generation process