Stealth and secured optical coherent transmission using a gain switched frequency comb and multi-homodyne coherent detection

A novel all-optical stealth and secured transmission is proposed and demonstrated. Spectral replicas of the covert signal are carried by multiple tones of a gain switched optical frequency comb, optically coded with spectral phase mask, and concealed below EDFA's noise. The secured signal's spectrum is spread far beyond the bandwidth of a coherent receiver, thus forcing real time all-optical processing. An unauthorized user, who does not possess knowledge on the phase mask, can only obtain a noisy and distorted signal, that cannot be improved by post-processing. On the other hand, the authorized user decodes the signal using an inverse spectral phase mask and achieves a substantial optical processing gain via multi-homodyne coherent detection. A transmission of 20 Gbps under negative -7.5 dB OSNR is demonstrated here, yielding error-free detection by the eligible user. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement