A new carrier index differential chaos shift keying (DCSK) modulation method combining index modulation (IM) with multicarrier DCSK (MC-DCSK) is proposed. Two schemes employing two different index selectors and detectors to implement IM and demodulation are introduced. The new designed index selectors are one-to-one mappings between the index symbols and the carrier activation patterns, which can avoid the disaster caused by the previous designed selectors. Analytical bit error rate expressions of the two systems are derived over the additive white Gaussian noise as well as multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation results verify the superiority of one scheme in energy efficiency and another scheme in spectral efficiency, respectively, compared with MC-DCSK.

A joint energy and correlation detection aided orthogonal frequency division multiplexing differential chaos shift keying (JECD-OFDM-DCSK) system is presented in this paper, where the reference and information-bearing signals of JECD-OFDM-DCSK are superimposed in the same time slot so that the phase offset between the reference and information-bearing signals is addressed. In JECD-OFDM-DCSK, only some subcarriers are activated and additional information bits are transmitted by the indices of these activated subcarriers, thereby improving the data rate while reducing the energy consumption. The energy efficiency, peak to average power ratio (PAPR) performance and system complexity of JECD-OFDM-DCSK are analyzed and then compared to other systems. The comparison results show JECD-OFDM-DCSK can obtain higher energy efficiency and better PAPR performance compared to its competitors at the cost of higher system complexity. Furthermore, the bit error rate (BER) expressions of JECD-OFDM-DCSK are derived in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and multipath fading channels. Simulation results show that the BER performance of JECD-OFDM-DCSK outperforms that of other OFDM-based DCSK systems. Finally, JECD-OFDM-DCSK performs much better than other systems over the underwater acoustic (UWA) channel, which validates the robustness of JECD-OFDM-DCSK.

The automatic identification system (AIS) is the automatic tracking system for automatic traffic control and collision avoidance services, which plays an important role in maritime traffic safety. However, it faces a possible security threat when the maritime mobile service identity (MMSI) that specifies the vessels’ identity in AIS is illegally counterfeited. To guarantee the communication security of AIS for preventing fraudulent devices, we design a novel lightweight Transformer-based network GLFormer for specific emitter identification (SEI) to provide an extra security layer for AIS terminal emitters. Concretely, the gated local attention unit (GLAU) and the gated sliding local attention unit (GSLAU) modules that combine a simplified gated attention unit (GAU) and a sliding local self-attention (SLA) are developed in GLFormer to extract the radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) features automatically from the raw in-phase signals. Especially, the simplified GAU focuses on more critical RFF features and filters out the irrelevant information from the raw signal to improve performance, which is also a single-head self-attention module with fewer parameters for lightweight. Meanwhile, the SLA limits self-attention operation to a window, introducing the inductive bias of local information to enhance performance further and reducing the quadratic computational complexity to linearity for efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the GLFormer achieves 96.31% and 89.38% identification accuracy in the constructed AIS transient and AIS steady-state datasets with 50 vessels, respectively. The 99.90% identification accuracy is achieved in the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) dataset with ten devices. It is not only better than the existing methods but requires much fewer parameters and lower computational complexity; besides, it is also suitable for working with long signal sequences.

Chaotic secure communication systems using chaotic waveforms as their spreading carriers can hide the transmitted information bits over a wide frequency range of chaotic waveform, which disguises the transmitted information waveform as noise. In this paper, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enabled M -ary differential chaos shift keying with block interleaving (RIS-MDCSK-BI) system is proposed for chaotic secure communications, where an RIS is deployed at the transmitter to assist communications and a pair of block interleaving patterns are used to interleave M -ary information-bearing signals to enhance security performance. Moreover, we propose a chaotic merging sort algorithm to generate different block interleaving patterns, where these interleaving patterns are encrypted by using the non-periodic and noise-like properties of chaotic signals. To estimate information bits at the legitimate receiver, we propose a sequential detection algorithm and a joint detection algorithm. Then, theoretical bit error rate (BER) performances of the proposed RIS-MDCSK-BI system with the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropping receiver are derived. The security performance metrics, including information leakage and secrecy outage probability, are also analyzed. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to verify the superior BER performance and security performance of the proposed RIS-MDCSK-BI system compared to benchmark systems.

In conventional M-ary differential chaos shift keying modulation (DCSK) systems, the distance between constellation points gets closer as M increases, resulting in poor performance. A hybrid modulation scheme based on pulse position modulation (PPM) and DCSK is proposed in the paper to improve bit-error-rate (BER) performance. In this scheme, one part of the bits is modulated by PPM while the other part is modulated by DCSK. Thus, information bearing signals are simultaneously modulated by the information bit and the selected pulse position of PPM which is determined by extra information bits. Analytical bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme is derived and verified by simulations. Results show that the considered scheme outperforms conventional M-DCSK, code index modulation DCSK (CIM-DCSK) and commutation code index DCSK (CCI-DCSK) in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and multipath Rayleigh fading channels.

In this paper, a square-constellation-based M-ary differential chaos-shift-keying (M-DCSK) communication system framework is proposed. The symbol-error-rate expression of the proposed system is derived over additive white Gaussian noise as well as multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Moreover, the peak-to-average-power-ratio (PAPR) performance is carefully analyzed for the newly proposed system. Based on the square-constellation-based M-DCSK framework, a simple least-square estimator is designed to demodulate the information exploiting pilot-assistant symbols. Analytical and simulated results show that the proposed system benefits from a lower energy consumption, but suffers from a higher PAPR compared with the circle-constellation-based M-DCSK system.