BER performance enhancement for secure wireless communication systems based on DCSK-MIMO techniques under Rayleigh fading channel

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in the use of chaotic techniques for enabling secure communication in recent years. This need has been motivated by the emergence of a number of wireless services which require the channel to provide very low bit error rates (BER) along with information security. As more and more information is transacted over wireless media, there has been increasing criminal activity directed against such systems. This paper investigates the feasibility of using chaotic communications over Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels. We have studied the performance of differential chaos shift keying (DCSK) with 2×2 Alamouti scheme and 2×1 Alamouti scheme for different chaotic maps over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and channels disturbed by Rayleigh fading. Both the inherently wideband DCSK modulation and the space-time block code (STBC) are techniques that can mitigate the effect of multipath fading. The use of these schemes allows us to enhance security without degrading the BER performance for Rayleigh fading channels. We have employed an exact method to analyze the performances of DCSK communication system over fading channel. Our simulations indicate that the combination of the STC and tent map provides the best BER performance in addition to security when compared to the choice of other maps. Hence, this study shows that the use of these schemes can allow the user to enhance security without degrading the BER performance while communicating over these channels. © 2013 Allerton Press, Inc.