Experimental Demonstrations of Chaotic Digital Filter-Based Physical Layer Security in Converged Fibre-mmWave Access Networks

Secure data transmission is experimentally demonstrated in a 1.67 Gb/s seamlessly converged fibre–millimeter wave (mmWave) network using the authors’ newly proposed chaotic digital filter (CDF)-based physical layer security (PLS) technique. The CDF-based encryption/decryption operates by introducing noise-like, key-dependent phase variations to conventional filter impulse responses. Validation is performed in a seamlessly converged network comprising a 25 km standard single-mode fibre (SSMF) link and a 5 m 36 GHz mmWave wireless link, utilizing cost-effective photonic-based mmWave generation and envelope detector-based reception. Experimental results show that the demonstrated PLS technique allows the encrypted signals to continuously flow between the fibre and radio frequency (RF) domains. The PLS technique also supports simultaneous optical and radio frequency access with almost identical BER transmission performances, and power penalties of <1 dB. To gain an in-depth understanding of the measured results, the CDFs’ characteristics, including their chaotic nature, sensitivity to security keys and optimum CDF design parameters, are explored both theoretically and experimentally in detail. The optimum security key properties and CDF's filter lengths are identified, which are independent of the transmission media and major characteristics of the encrypted signals. The CDF-based PLS technique offers salient advantages of ‘security-by-design’, ‘openness-by-design’, ‘dynamic security at the traffic level’, and ‘universal network compatibility’.