Robust timing and frequency joint synchronization method for QNSC-enabled security optical communications system based on CO-OFDM

The security of optical fiber communication network has been paid more and more attention, and Quantum Noise Stream Cipher (QNSC) can guarantee its physical layer security. However, the QNSC system realized with CO-OFDM technology is very susceptible to timing synchronization error and carrier frequency offset. Existing symbol timing and frequency synchronization algorithms based on preambles have problems of timing metric platform, interference of side lobes, and low timing and frequency synchronization accuracy especially in optical signal transmission scenario of high-order modulation and low SNR. Furthermore, the preamble is not encrypted, which can be easily identified by illegal receiver. In order to solve above problems, a robust timing and frequency joint synchronization algorithm is proposed. The algorithm is composed of the preamble interleaved by conjugate, negative and image sequences of original element sequence. The preamble conforms to the preamble structure of Schmidl, Minn and CNI by adding negative and conjugate operator at the specific interval of the preamble. The correspond timing metric method, i.e. combination of Schmidl, Minn and CNI timing metric strategies, can fully extract characteristics of the preamble, and then timing and frequency joint synchronization is accurately obtained. For timing synchronization, experiments in 10Gbit/s CO-OFDM based QNSC system have illustrated that proposed algorithm has better timing synchronization performance than baseline algorithms. The detection probability is augmented and timing offset mean is decreased than that of baseline algorithms especially at low SNR. The simulation illustrates that proposed algorithm has more accurate frequency offset (FO) estimation performance compared with the baseline algorithms even at low SNR. Furthermore, the simulation illustrates the security performance of CO-OFDM based QNSC system is improved by encrypting the preamble with secret key.