Optical Communication with Chaotic Waveforms

A high-dimensional chaotic waveform is generated by driving an erbium-doped fiber-ring laser with a digital information signal applied to an intraring electro-optic modulator. We show that a receiver with appropriately matched configuration, time delays, and relative amplitudes is able to recover the information signal, consisting of pseudorandom bits at 126 Mbits/sec, from the chaotic carrier. We also examine how recovery of the information fails when the receiver parameters are mismatched.