All-optical signal processing technique for secure optical communication

Secure optical communication technologies are important means to solve the physical layer security for optical network. We present a scheme of secure optical communication system by all-optical signal processing technique. The scheme consists of three parts, as all-optical signal processing unit, optical key sequence generator, and synchronous control unit. In the paper, all-optical signal processing method is key technology using all-optical exclusive disjunction (XOR) gate based on optical cross-gain modulation effect, has advantages of wide dynamic range of input optical signal, simple structure and so on. All-optical XOR gate composed of two semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) is a symmetrical structure. By controlling injection current, input signal power, delay and filter bandwidth, the extinction ratio of XOR can be greater than 8dB. Finally, some performance parameters are calculated and the results are analyzed. The simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method can be achieved over 10Gbps optical signal encryption and decryption, which is simple, easy to implement, and error-free diffusion. © 2015 SPIE