40 Gb/s, secure optical communication based upon fast reconfigurable time domain spectral phase en/decoding with 40 Gchip/s optical code and symbol overlapping

Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a 40 Gb/s secure optical communication system with on-off-keying (OOK) modulation format by using a time domain spectral phase en/decoding scheme, which employs a highly dispersive element and high-speed phase modulator for introducing significant symbol overlapping for both the encoded and incorrectly decoded noiselike signals to enhance the information security against eavesdropping using a power detector. The influence of dispersion and chip modulation rate on the symbol overlapping of the incorrectly decoded signal has been analytically investigated and experimentally verified. Security enhancement for 40 Gb/s OOK data using fast reconfigurable 40 Gchip/s optical codes with code lengths of up to 1024 has been demonstrated and compared with a 10 Gb/s system.