Chaotic modulations and performance analysis for digital underwater acoustic communications

• Two novel chaotic modulations are proposed to improve the security of underwater acoustic communications.
• An automatic modulation (AMC) system is designed to identify the modulation type and order of digital modulation signals.
• The proposed chaotic modulations have much lower probability of availability than conventional digital modulations.
• The performance of chaotic modulations in actual underwater acoustic communications was verified by an experiment.

Two modulation schemes, M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) and M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK), are commonly used for coherent and incoherent digital communications, respectively. Despite wide applications in underwater acoustic (UWA) communications, they are not suitable for confidential applications for their well-known generating processes and signal features. In this paper, two corresponding chaotic modulation methods are proposed to improve their security, namely chaotic MPSK (CMPSK) and chaotic MFSK (CMFSK). By application of chaotic sequences into the modulation procedures, they can prevent the unauthorized receivers from extracting information from the intercepted signals even with high SNR. The confidential performance of chaotic modulations is evaluated by a designed automatic modulation classification (AMC) system. Simulation results indicate a success identification rate of more than 90% for the MPSK and MFSK signal at the SNR from −10 dB to 40 dB, but only an identification rate of nearly zero for the CMPSK and CMFSK signal. Therefore, chaotic modulations have lower available probability and can achieve higher confidential performance. Also, an experiment was conducted to verify the performance of chaotic modulations in actual UWA communications. The experimental results show that chaotic modulations can achieve similar bit error ratio (BER) compared with conventional digital modulations, which verifies potential applications of chaotic modulations in confidential UWA communications.