Design and realization of an FPGA-based generator for chaotic frequency hopping sequences

Chaos-based pseudonoise (PN) sequences for spread spectrum (SS) communicati ons ranks amongst the most promising applications of chaos to communication s, This paper deals with the design and realization of a chaotic frequency hopping (FH) sequence generator that is compatible with current FH/SS techn ologies. A simplistic generator architecture adopting nonlinear auto-regres sive (AR) filter structures is proposed, which is based on the random seque nce model and the metric entropy criterion for generation of random sequenc es, Conventional PN sequences are employed to perturb the generator such th at the resulted sequences fulfill the FH requirements on period and family size, In addition, a chaos-based FH sequence generator prototype is realize d in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and various tests are performed . The generator produces long period FH sequences with uniform distribution over the available bandwidth, large linear complexity as well as suboptima l Hamming correlation properties, Bit error rate (BER) performance of the c haos-based asynchronous FH/CDMA system is evaluated by means of computer si mulation, These results suggest that the cost-effective and well-performing generator has the potential to be incorporated into existing FH systems.