IEEE JOURNAL OF QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 45, NO. 7, JULY 2009 879
Time-Delay Identification in a Chaotic Semiconductor
Laser With Optical Feedback: A Dynamical
Point of View
Damien Rontani, Alexandre Locquet, Marc Sciamanna, David S. Citrin, and Silvia Ortin
Abstract—A critical issue in optical chaos-based communica-
tions is the possibility to identify the parameters of the chaotic
emitter and, hence, to break the security. In this paper, we study
theoretically the identification of a chaotic emitter that consists of
a semiconductor laser with an optical feedback. The identification
of a critical security parameter, the external-cavity round-trip
time (the time delay in the laser dynamics), is performed using
both the auto-correlation function and delayed mutual informa-
tion methods applied to the chaotic time-series. The influence
on the time-delay identification of the experimentally tunable
parameters, i.e., the feedback rate, the pumping current, and
the time-delay value, is carefully studied. We show that diffi-
cult time-delay-identification scenarios strongly depend on the
time-scales of the system dynamics as it undergoes a route to
chaos, in particular on how close the relaxation oscillation period
is from the external-cavity round-trip time.
Index Terms—Nonlinear dynamics, optical feedback, semicon-
ductor laser, time-delay identification.
I. INTRODUCTION
S
EMICONDUCTOR lasers with an external cavity (ECSLs)
have been considered as rich sources of optical chaos, with
well-known chaotic regimes such as the so-called coherence
collapse [1] and low-frequency fluctuation (LFF) regimes [2].
In these regimes, ECSLs have received considerable attention
Manuscript received July 24, 2008; revised October 29, 2008. Current version
published June 10, 2009. The work of D. S. Citrin was supported in part by the
National Science Foundation under Grant ECCS 0523923.
D. Rontani is with the Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité (Supélec), Laboratoire
Matériaux Optiques, Photonique et Systèmes (LMOPS), Centre National de
la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), F-57070 Metz, France and with the Unité
Mixte Internationale UMI 2958 GeorgiaTech-CNRS, F-57070 Metz, France.
He is also with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia
Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 USA (e-mail: damien.rontani@su-
pelec.fr).
A. Locquet is with the Unité Mixte Internationale UMI 2958 GeorgiaTech-
CNRS, F-57070 Metz, France (e-mail: alocquet@georgiatech-metz.fr).
M. Sciamanna is with the Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité (Supélec), Labora-
toire Matériaux Optiques, Photonique et Systèmes (LMOPS), Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), F-57070 Metz, France and with the
Unité Mixte Internationale UMI 2958 GeorgiaTech-CNRS, F-57070 Metz,
France (e-mail: marc.sciamanna@supelec.fr).
D. S. Citrin is with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 USA and with the Unité
Mixte Internationale UMI 2958 GeorgiaTech-CNRS, F-57070 Metz (e-mail:
david.citrin@ece.gatech.edu).
S. Ortin is with the Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Consejo Superior de In-
vestigaciones Científicas (CSIC)-Universidad de Cantabria, Santander E-39005,
Spain (e-mail: ortin@ifca.unican.es).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JQE.2009.2013116
since they constitute key elements of optical secure chaotic com-
munications [3]. Indeed, the addition of an external cavity in-
troduces an infinite number of degrees of freedom through the
time delay in the dynamical representation of the semiconductor
laser, leading to the generation of high-dimensional chaos [4].
The unpredictable and noisy appearance of the signals emitted
by hyper-chaotic optical systems has been used to enhance se-
curity and privacy in communications. A chaotic carrier con-
ceals and transmits an information bearing message, which is
decrypted by synchronization at the receiver end (a physical
copy of the chaotic emitter) [3], [5]–[8]. The security of such
a chaos-based communication scheme relies mainly on the dif-
ficulty to identify the emitter parameters and on the sensitivity
of synchronization to parameter mismatch [9]. Therefore, it is
of key importance to study the feasibility of an eavesdropper to
retrieve information on the parameters of a given chaotic gener-
ator from its transmitted time series.
In delayed hyper-chaotic systems, the security assump-
tion relies on the computational complexity to reconstruct
a high-dimensional attractor from the time series. However,
the knowledge of the time delay allows for the projection
of the high-dimensional attractor onto a reduced-dimen-
sional phase space, which makes the system vulnerable to
low-computational-complexity identification techniques [10].
It is thus crucial that the delay not be easily identifiable in
a cryptosystem. Until recently, ECSLs with a single optical
feedback were considered as weakly secure systems in terms
of time-delay identification, such that the use of several ex-
ternal cavities has been suggested [12]. However, we have
shown recently that a simple ECSL with a single optical
feedback could, with a careful choice of parameters, hide its
time-delay signature when standard estimators are employed
[13]. Interestingly, the region of laser and feedback parameters
where such a difficult time-delay identification occurs does
not necessarily correspond to the situation where the chaos
complexity (dimension and entropy) is higher [4]. Indeed, in
laser diodes with optical feedback, high-dimensional chaos is
typically found where the optical feedback strength is large, but
then the time-delay value is easily retrieved from the analysis
of the chaotic output using straightforward techniques [13].
Time-delay identification should therefore be considered as
an additional argument to appreciate the level of security of
chaos-based communications, besides chaos complexity and
robustness of chaos synchronization.
In this paper, we extend our earlier work on time-delay iden-
tification in ECSL. Conventional techniques such as autocorre-
0018-9197/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE
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