IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 4, NO.

6, DECEMBER 2015

589

Detectability of Chaotic Direct-Sequence Spread-Spectrum Signals

Sedighe Sedaghatnejad and Mahmoud Farhang, Member, IEEE

AbstractChaotic spreading sequences were previously proposed for use in direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) communications systems, and it was suggested that the nonbinary nature
of these sequences would result in an improvement in the low
probability of intercept (LPI) performance of the signal. In this
letter, we derive the structure of the optimum intercept receivers
for chaotic DSSS signals in a statistical framework by exploiting the known probabilistic behavior of spreading sequences. A
performance comparison between the optimal receivers and more
practical suboptimum detectorswhich overlook the multilevel
nature of chaotic sequencesis also provided. The results imply
that the use of chaotic spreading sequences would not help increase
the covertness of DSSS signals.
Index TermsChaotic communications, direct-sequence spreadspectrum, low probability of intercept (LPI), spreading sequence.

I. I NTRODUCTION

IRECT-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) is one of the

main techniques of providing low probability of interception and detection and achieving physical-layer secrecy [1], [2].
By applying a pseudo-noise (PN) code to the signal, its energy
is spread over a wide bandwidth and its power spectral density
could be lowered even below that of the noise, making it very
difficult for an interceptor to detect the presence of the signal.
The use of chaotic sequences as spectral spreading sequences
in DSSS communications systems was first proposed in [3] to
avoid the vulnerability of conventional DSSS systems which
employ binary PN sequences [4], [5], and received increasing
consideration [6][10].
Chaotic spreading sequences are particularly promising for
secure and covert communications due to their nonbinary and
nonperiodic behavior, whereupon it was suggested that it could
reduce the likelihood of being intercepted by an unintended
listener [3], [10], [11]. However, few results are available
regarding the low probability of intercept (LPI) performance
of chaotic DSSS systems. The LPI performance concerns the
detectability of the received signal from the viewpoint of a
receiver (interceptor) which has minimal knowledge of the
signal parameters and only wants to detect the presence of the
signal (demodulation of the data is not of interest).
In [11] LPI performance of several intercept receivers for
chaotic DSSS signals is examined using a simple binaryManuscript received April 5, 2015; revised July 24, 2015; accepted
August 4, 2015. Date of publication August 18, 2015; date of current version
December 15, 2015. This work was supported in part by Iran National Elites
Foundation (INEF). The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper
and approving it for publication was R. M. Buehrer.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran (e-mail: sedaghatnejad@shirazu.ac.ir;
mfarhang@shirazu.ac.ir).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LWC.2015.2469776

correlating approach and expressions for probability of detection of each receiver are derived. While simple binary detection
reduces the complexity of chaotic detectors, it overlooks the
nonbinary nature and statistical properties of chaotic spreading
sequences and, to the best of our knowledge, the optimal detectors for multilevel chaotic sequences and their performance
have not been hitherto studied.
In this letter, we derive the optimum interception schemes
for chaotic DSSS signals and analyze their performance (here,
the optimality is meant to be in the class of all receivers which
exploit the general probabilistic behavior of the chaotic signal
and exact dynamics of the chaotic system is not known to them,
or disregard it to greatly simplify the receiver structure). The
results imply that using multilevel chaotic sequences could not
reduce the detectability of DSSS signals. We also compare the
performance of the optimal detectors with that of the more
practical suboptimum receivers.
In Section II, a description of the problem and the system
model is given. Section III investigates the optimum intercept
receiver structures. In Section IV some simulation results are
presented and Section V concludes the letter.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
A. Chaotic Spreading Sequences
Chaotic spreading sequences generated by certain dynamical
systems are nonbinary, nonperiodic sequences which are hypersensitive to changes in initial conditions. Chaotic systems
can be continuous or discrete-time. One-dimensional discrete
maps which can be written as ak = g(ak1 ) are of most use
in communications due to their ease of implementation [12].
Despite the fact that a sequence generated by such a map has a
completely deterministic behavior, it can be shown that, under
some mild conditions, the chaotic sequence can be statistically modeled as a stochastic process [13][15]. Indeed, an
important method to describe a dynamical systems behavior
within its chaotic regime, especially for one-dimensional maps,
is its invariant probability density function (PDF). The invariant
PDF determines the probability density of the iterates to relate
the concepts of deterministic chaos to the familiar probability
theory. For most chaotic dynamical systems these probability
distributions must be computed numerically [16]. However,
fortunately, for some practically important chaotic maps the
invariant PDF can be obtained analytically [12], [15], [17].
The most commonly used chaotic maps with very good
noise-like behavior are the logistic (quadratic), tent (triangular), Bernoulli (sawtooth), and cubic maps, each with domain
[1, 1] and comprising a bifurcation parameter (see Table I).
The bifurcation parameters are chosen such that dynamics of
the maps fall into their chaotic regime. The invariant PDFs
of the above maps are summarized in Table II.

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590

IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 4, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2015

TABLE I
C OMMON C HAOTIC M APS AND T HEIR PARAMETERS

coherent/noncoherent interception may be considered [11], [19].

Here, we will consider the two cases of synchronous coherent
and asynchronous noncoherent receivers. In the former, the
carrier phase and chip epoch of the received signal are assumed
to be known. This assumption, despite being quite nonrealistic
for an intercept receiver, yields an algebraically closed form
structure for the detector. Moreover, the probability of detection
of this receiver serves as an upper bound for the performance in
all other cases [19]. In the latter, the more realistic intercept
receiverin which both the chip epoch and carrier phase are
unknownis considered.

TABLE II
I NVARIANT P ROBABILITY D ENSITY F UNCTIONS

A. Synchronous Coherent Receiver

Each map, when exhibiting its chaotic behavior, generates

a nonperiodic and nonconverging sequence {an } which is extremely sensitive to the initial condition, i.e., two very close
values for a0 result in completely different and uncorrelated
sequences. Also, the auto-correlation function of these realvalued nonbinary sequences is very similar to the -like correlation function of random binary sequences [3], [18]. Therefore,
they have emerged as suitable candidates for spreading sequences in DSSS systems [3], [6][10].
B. Detection Problem
The general signal detection problem can be described by the
hypothesis test

2Pa(t) cos(0 t + ) + n(t), H1
(1)
r(t) =
n(t),
H0
in which P, 0 and are the average signal power, carrier
frequency and carrier phase, respectively. n(t) is an additive
white Gaussian noise with single-sided power spectral density
N0 , and
a(t) =

an p(t nTc Tc )

(2)

n=

where p(t) is a unit-amplitude pulse of duration Tc , Tc is the

chip epoch, with  in [0, 1), and {an } is the chaotic spreading
sequence. The observation time is T and T = NTc . The chaotic
sequence is assumed to be unknown at the intercept receiver,
except for the invariant PDF of its generating map. The case that
no prior information is available about the spreading sequence
will be also discussed in the following.
III. O PTIMAL I NTERCEPT R ECEIVERS
In this section the optimum chaotic intercept receiver structures exploiting the known distribution of the amplitude of the
spreading waveform are investigated.
Depending on the knowledge of the chip epoch and the carrier
phase at the receiver, four cases of synchronous/asynchronous

With the assumption that the receiver has complete knowledge of the carrier phase and chip epoch , with no loss
of generality the received signal under H1 can be written as


r(t) = 2P
an p(t nTc ) cos 0 t + n(t).
n=

Under the Neyman-Pearson criteria, the optimum decision

rule is obtained by averaging the likelihood ratio over {an }
H1

Ean {L (r(t))} 0

(3)

H0

in which 0 is a real-valued threshold (determined from the

false-alarm probability) and the likelihood ratio is easily shown
to be [20]



N1

PTc a2n + 2 2Pan rn
exp
(4)
L (r(t)) =
N0
n=0

 nTc
with rn = (n1)T
r(t) cos(0 t)dt. As can be seen from the
c
above relations, the likelihood ratio test (LRT) depends on the
parameter P which is not usually a priori known at the intercept
receiver. Hence, a uniformly most powerful (UMP) detector
is not available for this hypothesis test and other suboptimal
detection schemes should be pursued.
The generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) is usually the
main approach adopted in such a problem [21]. In this case,
the test statistic is obtained by replacing the unknown average
signal power under hypothesis H1 by its maximum-likelihood
Although the GLRT is a suboptimal test,
(ML) estimate P.
it proves to have a near optimal performance in many cases.
Indeed, numerical results to be discussed in Section IV confirm
that the receiver based on the GLRT has essentially the same
performance as the ideal (hypothetical) detector which knows
the exact value of P (the so-called clairvoyant detector [21]).
Moreover, in the case that the distribution of the spreading
sequence is not known either, one usually resorts to detectors
which are invariant to {an }, and a uniformly most powerful
invariant (UMPI) detector will be adopted [22]. This approach
will not be further pursued here and is left for a later work.
We now proceed to evaluate the expectation in (3) for two
of the most encountered probability densities of the chaotic
spreading sequences, namely, beta and uniform distributions
(Table II).
For the tent (or Bernoulli) map, {an } can be modeled as a sequence of independent identically distributed random variables

SEDAGHATNEJAD AND FARHANG: DETECTABILITY OF CHAOTIC DIRECT-SEQUENCE SPREAD-SPECTRUM SIGNALS

591

with a uniform PDF in [1, 1], and the average LRT can be
directly obtained as
2rn2 
N1
 e N0 Tc
H1
N0
.
. [Q(z1 ) Q(z2 )] 0
(5)
=
c
2
H0
PT
n=0







2
2
2
2

where z1 = N0 PTc Tc rn , z2 = N0
PTc Tc rn ,

 u2
and Q(x) = 1 x e 2 du.
2
For the logistic (or cubic) map, the expectation in (3) cannot
be put into a closed form. However, if we use the approximation
N1
 2
an = N a2n , which is quite accurate for large N, averaging
n=0

over {an } (with a beta distribution) and some simplifications

yield the following test statistic for the average LRT:


N1

n
2 2Pr
(6)
I0
=
N0
n=0

Fig. 1. Detection performance of optimum and suboptimum intercept receivers for logistic map.

where I0 (x) is the zeroth-order modified Bessel function of the

first kind.
B. Asynchronous Noncoherent Receiver
We now consider the more realistic case in which both the
carrier phase and chip epoch are unknown at the intercept
receiver. Assuming uniform distributions in [0, 2] and [0, 1]
for and , respectively, the average LRT is readily obtained as





 1 N1
  1
H1
j rj
2 2Pa

=
I0
f (aj )daj d 0 (7)
N0
H0
0
1
j=0

in which f (aj ) is the invariant PDF of the chaotic sequence

(cf. Table II), and

2
(8)
rj = rI2j + rQ
j
with


 
 (j+1)TcTc
rIj
cos 0 t
r(t)
dt; j = 0, . . . , N 1.
= 2
sin 0 t
rQj
jTc Tc
(9)
In the following section, we compare the probability of
detection of the above optimum receivers with the suboptimum,
significantly less complex detectors of [11]. Using a two-level
quantization for {an }, i.e., exploiting only the information in
the sign of an , [11] obtained simple suboptimum detectors for
chaotic DSSS waveforms whose general structure is of the form
N1
 2 H1
rn 0 .
n=0

H0

IV. N UMERICAL R ESULTS

The complex structure of the optimum receivers obtained
above prohibits the analytical evaluation of the detection performance. Hence, in this section simulation results are presented to
have a comparison of the performance of different detectors and
evaluate the SNR penalty incurred if more feasible suboptimum
receivers are to be used.

Fig. 2. Detection performance of optimum and suboptimum intercept receivers for tent map.

Simulation results for optimal detection schemes are presented in Figs. 1 and 2, respectively for sequences generated
by logistic and tent maps (as representatives of the two PDF
classes). The performance of the ideal detector which knows
the exact value of P is also included as a benchmark for
comparison. The SNR per chip is defined as PTc E{a2n}/N0 , the
probability of false alarm was set to PFA = 0.01, and we have
assumed that N = 1000.
As can be seen, the asynchronous noncoherent receiver is
more than 2.5 dB inferior to its synchronous coherent counterpart in performance. It should also be noted that the difference
in the performance of the GLRT-based detector and the ideal
clairvoyant detector is intangible.
A comparison of the LPI performance of the two chaotic
spreading sequences, as well as the random binary PN sequence, is made in Figs. 3 and 4 for synchronous coherent
and asynchronous noncoherent receivers, respectively. We note

592

IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 4, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2015

V. C ONCLUSION
We derived the structure of optimal intercept receivers for
chaotic DSSS signals by exploiting the multilevel nature and
statistical properties of spreading sequences, and evaluated their
performance. It was shown that the difference in the LPI performance of the conventional binary PN and the proposed chaotic
DSSS signals would be insignificant. Moreover, we observed
that the optimum and more feasible suboptimum detectors have
nearly the same performance.

R EFERENCES

Fig. 3. Detection performance of optimum and suboptimum detectors for

different chaotic maps, synchronous-coherent case.

Fig. 4. Detection performance of optimum and suboptimum detectors for

different chaotic maps, asynchronous-noncoherent case.

that the binary PN sequence when detected by the receivers

of [11] (which are near-optimal for binary sequences [19]) has
almost the same detection probability as the optimum detection
of chaotic sequences. In other words, the application of chaotic
spreading sequences in DSSS systems cannot result in a lower
probability of detection for intercept receivers.
Included in the figures is also the detection probability of
suboptimum receivers reproduced from [11], in which the SNR
per chip is anomalously defined as PTc E{|an |}/N0 . When the
results are plotted using the conventional definition of SNR
noted above, the 1 to 2 dB superiority of optimal detection
of chaotic signals vanishes and the curves for optimum and
suboptimum receivers nearly overlap. That is, the information
about the statistical behavior of the chaotic sequence is not
of much help in the improvement of the performance of the
intercept receiver.

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