Design of a Short Reference Noncoherent Chaos-Based Communication Systems

Data rate and energy efficiency decrement caused by the transmission of reference and data carrier signals in equal portions constitute the major drawback of differential chaos shift keying (DCSK) systems. To overcome this dominant drawback, a short reference DCSK system (SR-DCSK) is proposed. In SR-DCSK, the number of chaotic samples that constitute the reference signal is shortened to R such that it occupies less than half of the bit duration. To build the transmitted data signal, P concatenated replicas of R are used to spread the data. This operation increases data rate and enhances energy efficiency without imposing extra complexity onto the system structure. The receiver uses its knowledge of the integers R and P to recover the data. The proposed system is analytically studied and the enhanced data rate and bit energy saving percentages are computed. Furthermore, theoretical performance for AWGN and multipath fading channels are derived and validated via simulation. In addition, optimising the length of the reference signal R is exposed to detailed discussion and analysis. Finally, the application of the proposed short reference technique to the majority of transmit reference systems such as DCSK, multicarrier DCSK, and quadratic chaos shift keying enhances the overall performance of this class of chaotic modulations and is, therefore, promising.