Abstract
In this paper, we present a polarization-assisted L-ary differential phase-shift keying multipulse pulse-position modulation (PA.LDPSK-MPPM) technique that is secured in the physical layer by a discrete-chaos system. The all-optical PA.LDPSK-MPPM scheme benefits from the polarization as an additional degree of freedom which greatly reduces the system complexity relative to prior implementations. The discrete-chaos scrambling is based on a message-seeded two-dimensional chaotic map tailored for independent perturbation of the occupied time-slot positions (MPPM information) and their relative phase shift (LDPSK information). Synchronized and non-synchronized implementations of the chaotic PA.LDPSK-MPPM technique are proposed with expressions for the corresponding spectral efficiencies being determined and compared with prior LDPSK-MPPM setups. The performance of PA.LDPSK-MPPM under gamma-gamma (GG) free-space optical (FSO) fading channels is analytically verified to outperform the prior designs for different FSO channel states which is supplemented by Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The system security is numerically examined against various types of attacks, including brute-force, differential, and statistical attacks.