Control-oriented data encoding/decoding for chaotic secure communications

Abstract This paper deals with a control-oriented encoding/decoding scheme for digital information, involving unidirectionally coupled chaotic systems for secure communication purposes. From the transmitter viewpoint, the proposed approach essentially consists in a closed-loop encoding scheme where the (digital) data are injected within the dynamics of the (chaotic) encoder, via a control law aiming at forcing the encoder to track a chaotic reference model. From the receiver viewpoint, the decoding is achieved by means of both a controlled synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver, and a controlled tracking of a reference model (a replica of the transmitter one). The paper then focuses on recovering of the message in case of a transmitted scalar signal (namely, an encoder state trajectory) which does not directly (i.e., explicitly) contains the information. Finally, the usage (context, constraints, ...) of such a communication scheme is discussed, and an illustrative example based on Chua's circuits is presented.