Polar coded optical OFDM system with chaotic encryption for physical-layer security

Abstract The security of the transmission system based on optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been an important research direction recently. Polar code is also a key technique for reducing bit error rate (BER) as a promising forward error correction (FEC) scheme. In the paper, a polar coded optical OFDM system using chaotic encryption is proposed. In the proposed system, a two-dimensional Henon map is utilized to generate chaotic sequences to encrypt subcarriers data for enhancing physical layer security. Meanwhile, polar code can improve the reliability and performance of the system. The simulation results show that the polar code can achieve ∼ 7.4 dB gain at the BER of 1 0 − 3 compared to the conventional case after 60 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) transmission, and chaotic encryption can effectively protect the signal from illegal attack. Hence, the proposed method is capable of enhancing the physical layer security and simultaneously achieves lower BER.