Effect of filtering on the synchronization and performance of chaos-based secure communication over Rayleigh fading channel

Chaos synchronization is one of the main challenging issues involved in the development of wireless chaos-based secure communication (CBSC) due its crucial influence on the error performance and system reliability. This paper is concerned with the effect of filtering chaotic signals on the synchronization and error performance of CBSC schemes due to the finite bandwidth of realistic fading channel and/or signal detection necessities. The double scroll chaotic attractor is employed at the transmit and receive terminals as in a drive-response configuration with identical synchronization and a low pass filter model is utilized in this investigation. The upper bound of bit error probability considering Rayleigh fading channel and synchronization mean squared error is derived and evaluated for different values of filter parameter. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that as the filter cut-off frequency decreased lower than the chaotic signal bandwidth, the synchronization error is considerably increased due to high distortion in the normal geometrical configuration of the attractor. As a result, the average bit-error-rate performance is degraded significantly with high possibility of link failure. Therefore, careful system design should be made to mitigate the filtering effects and achieve the essential synchronization of promising CBSC systems.