Multi-Carrier Chaos Shift Keying: System Design and Performance Analysis

Based on multi-carrier transmission and multi-level chaos shift keying modulation, a novel multi-carrier chaos shift keying (MC-CSK) modulation system is proposed and designed in this paper. The new system adopts multiple subcarriers, on which all chaotic basis signals along with multiple data-bearing signals are transmitted simultaneously. The data-bearing signals and their references, though sharing the same subcarriers, are separated by I/Q channels. As a consequence, the MC-CSK system can achieve higher bit rate and better spectral efficiency compared with the MC-DCSK system. It can also dispense with chaos synchronization and threshold shifting that are required in conventional CSK systems, and achieve a delay-line-free design in both transmitters and receivers. Also, the performance of the proposed system is further improved by normalizing all chaotic basis signals and making them strictly orthogonal using the Gram-Schmidt algorithm. Moreover, the bit error rates (BERs) of the MC-CSK system over additive white Gaussian noise and multipath Rayleigh fading channels are derived. Finally, simulations are performed under different channel conditions and the effects of system parameters on the BER performance are evaluated. Both analytical and simulation results confirm that the MC-CSK system outperforms differential CSK (DCSK) and MC-DCSK systems in BER performance, except a rare case when the number of subcarriers is very small.