Abstract—In this paper, a new non-coherent chaos-based communication scheme, named orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based different chaos shift keying (OFDM-DCSK), is presented inspired by multi-carrier direct sequence code-division multiple access (MC-DS-CDMA) system, multi-carrier DCSK (MC-DCSK) system, and channel estimation of OFDM system. In this scheme, all of the occupied subcarriers are grouped into several groups. In each group, one chaotic reference is transmitted over the central subcarrier, while multiple modulated data streams are transmitted over the remaining subcarriers. Therefore, this transmitter structure increases the spectral efficiency, compared with the conventional DCSK system. At the receiver side, no radio frequency delay circuits are needed to demodulate the received data, which makes the system easy to implement in practice. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the OFDM-DCSK system is derived based on Gaussian approximation under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Simulation results are given under AWGN and two-path Rayleigh flat fading channel, which confirm the effectiveness of this new design.

Index Terms—Chaos communications, differential chaos shift keying, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing DCSK, non-coherent demodulation.

Cite: Shuying Li, Yaqin Zhao, and Zhilu Wu, "Design and Analysis of an OFDM-based Differential Chaos Shift Keying Communication System," Journal of Communications, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 199-205, 2015. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.10.3.199-205