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IEEE photonics journal

Frequency-Hopping Optical Stealth Communication System Based on Supercontinuum Spectrum Laser Source

Han Zhou, Jilin Zheng, Tao Pu, Jiaqi Zhao, Jin Li, Yukai Chen, Mengqi Zhao, Hua Zhou, Han Xue, Yang Liu

Published Aug 2, 2024• 5 citations

Abstract

A frequency-hopping optical stealth communication scheme based on a supercontinuum spectrum laser source is proposed and demonstrated in a proof-of-principle experiment. In this system, the frequency bands of the wavelength selective switch (WSS) turn off in the public channel and the WSS select in the stealth channel are consistent. Hence, the supercontinuum spectrum signal light can be embedded in the spectral gap of different wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) signals to achieve the effect of concealment. By selecting different frequency bands to access the public channel at different times based on a WSS, providing huge flexibility and additional security. Attributing to the narrower frequency band occupied by the public signal, the colossal convenience of the frequency hopping of the stealth signal carrier can be guaranteed. In order to measure the security of the proposed scheme, the physical layer security of the system using the interception probability as an index is investigated

DOI: 10.1109/jphot.2024.3437252

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A frequency-hopping optical stealth communication scheme based on a supercontinuum spectrum laser source is proposed and demonstrated in a proof-of-principle experiment. In this system, the frequency bands of the wavelength selective switch (WSS) turn off in the public channel and the WSS select in the stealth channel are consistent. Hence, the supercontinuum spectrum signal light can be embedded in the spectral gap of different wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) signals to achieve the effect of concealment. By selecting different frequency bands to access the public channel at different times based on a WSS, providing huge flexibility and additional security. Attributing to the narrower frequency band occupied by the public signal, the colossal convenience of the frequency hopping of the stealth signal carrier can be guaranteed. In order to measure the security of the proposed scheme, the physical layer security of the system using the interception probability as an index is investigated

In this Letter, the optical stealth transmission carried by super-continuum spectrum optical pulses generated in highly nonlinear fiber is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the proposed transmission scheme, super-continuum signals are reshaped in the spectral domain through a wavelength-selective switch and are temporally spread by a chromatic dispersion device to achieve the same noise-like characteristic as the noise in optical networks, so that in both the time domain and the spectral domain, the stealth signals are hidden in public channel. Our experimental results show that compared with existing schemes where stealth channels are carried by amplified spontaneous emission noise, super-continuum signal can increase the transmission performance and robustness.

We develop a spread-spectrum-based approach to security-enhanced transmission over an existing public wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) lightwave network. Secure transmission for a dedicated user is achieved by overlaying a covert channel onto a multichannel WDM network. The covert channel is spectrally encoded using the technique of frequency hopping and then temporally spread by a dispersive element, with the resulting average power below the noise floor in the fiber. The presence of the WDM channels provides an ad hoc security expansion and increases the difficulty for an eavesdropper to intercept and decode the secure signal

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) optical stealth transmission system carried by amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise. The stealth signal is hidden in both time and frequency domains by using ASE noise as the signal carrier. Each WDM channel uses part of the ASE spectrum, which provides more flexibility to apply stealth transmission in a public network and adds another layer of security to the stealth channel. Multi-channel transmission also increases the overall channel capacity, which is the major limitation of the single stealth channel transmission based on ASE noise. The relations between spectral bandwidth and coherence length of ASE carrier have been theoretically analyzed and experimentally investigated.

We report a real-time 150 kbps stealth transmission within public optical communication of 10 Gbps dual polarization QPSK. The stealth data is modulated onto the frequency tuning signals of a fast-tuning laser source in the transmitter, which causes slight frequency dithering for the transmitted optical signal. In the receiver, the stealth receiver recovers the stealth data from the estimated frequency offset by the QPSK DSP algorithm. The experiments show the stealth transmission has few impacts on the public channel over a 300 km distance. The proposed method is fully compatible with existing optical transmission systems, and the only hardware change is to upgrade the transmitter laser to support frequency tuning through an external analog port for receiving stealth signal. The proposed stealth scheme can combine with cryptographic protocols to improve the integrated security of the system, and can be used as signaling transport for low level network control to reduce the communication overhead.

Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) light is the most natural optical carrier to hide a message in the existing optical networks at photonic layer. To enhance the anti-intercept ability of the ASE-carried stealth channel, a novel optical stealth communication scheme based on quantum noise stream cipher is proposed. The ASE light is intensity modulated by the cipher-text according to Y-00 protocol, and then transmitted under public optical noise after power attenuation. The expression of quantum noise stream ciphered ASE signal is derived, and numerical simulation is carried out. A proof-of-concept experiment is set up to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme. The experiment results show that the quantum noise stream ciphered stealth signals can be transmitted over a 25 km single-mode fiber span error-free.

A semi-physical simulation was proposed on stealth transmission of 10Gbps 127-chip superstructure fiber Bragg grating (SSFBG) based equivalent phase shift (EPS) temporal phase encoded/decoded (TPE/D) on-off keyed (OOK) optical-code-division multiplexing (OCDM) secure signal over a 2-wavelength 10Gbps wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) public network. Secure signal can be error-free transmitted beneath the noise floor of 2-wavelength public WDM network both in temporal and frequency domain. The decoding performance of secure signal was highly affected by wavelength space between public and stealth channel. The power penalty of each WDM channel was less than 0.1dB due to existence of secure signal.