Synchronization of Lorenz-based chaotic circuits with applications to communications

A circuit implementation of the chaotic Lorenz system is described. The chaotic behavior of the circuit closely matches the results predicted by numerical experiments. Using the concept of synchronized chaotic systems (SCS's), two possible approaches to secure communications are demonstrated with the Lorenz circuit implemented in both the transmitter and receiver. In the first approach, a chaotic masking signal is added at the transmitter to the message, and at the receiver, the masking is regenerated and subtracted from the received signal. The second approach utilizes modulation of the coefficients of the chaotic system in the transmitter and corresponding detection of synchronization error in the receiver to transmit binary-valued bit streams. The use of SCS's for communications relies on the robustness of the synchronization to perturbations in the drive signal. As a step toward further understanding the inherent robustness, we establish an analogy between synchronization in chaotic systems, nonlinear observers for deterministic systems, and state estimation in probabilistic systems. This analogy exists because SCS's can be viewed as performing the role of a nonlinear state space observer. To calibrate the robustness of the Lorenz SCS as a nonlinear state estimator, we compare the performance of the Lorenz SCS to an extended Kalman filter for providing state estimates when the measurement consists of a single noisy transmitter component. >