Secure optical communication system based on polarization regulation of the data fragmentation multipath transmission technology

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a data fragment multipath transmission scheme to achieve a secure optical communication based on polarization regulation. A dual-polarization Mach–Zehnder modulator (DPMZM) is driven by digital signals which are scattered by field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and transmitted in multiple paths. By utilizing two orthogonal polarization states, we have achieved a signal transmission under different optical parameters, and the transmission rate of the two paths can reach over 10 Gbps through a 20 km fiber with 2.5 Gbps hopping rate. In addition, we establish a theoretical model to analyze the security of the system and simulate brute force cracking; the probability of cracking the minimum information unit is 1.53 × 10−53. This proves that it is difficult to obtain a user data even using the fastest computers. Our scheme has provided, to our knowledge, a new approach for physical layer security.