Combating channel distortions for chaotic signals

Over the past several years, there have been various proposals for communication with chaotic signals. But the issue of compensating the distortions introduced by the physical channel like noise, time varying fading and multi-path has not been fully addressed. In this paper, we first describe a noise reduction method for chaotic signals corrupted by an additive noise. The method uses the phenomenon of chaos synchronization to approximate the maximum likelihood (ML) decoder for the AWGN channel. Further we use the synchronizing receiver to nullify slowly time varying fading and multi-path. We find the region of operation for such a receiver and show how the time varying parameters characterizing such channels can be tracked at the receiver.