Generalized Multi-carrier Chaotic Shift Keying

Chaotic shift-keying, perhaps better described as chaotic carrier shift keying (CSK), encodes information in the selection of a time-synchronized orthogonal spread spectrum signal and decodes that same information by comparing the output of parallel despreaders. The general performance of CSK waveforms lacks that of coherent single-carrier modulations due to each despreader generating an independent noise statistic and potential for inter-correlations between assumed orthogonal carriers. However, the multiple carriers can be employed to significantly increase the throughput capacity of the spread waveform, permitting novel modulations that also take advantage of other phase or amplitude manipulations, much like an OFDM system. This paper generalizes the analytical and simulation results for arbitrary multi-carrier CSK systems, as well as reports on measured hardware results of a lower-order hardware CSK implementation.