Thursday, November 15, 2007

Chaos.. every where

We all know communication is all about sending and receiving the information correctly,
without any errors at all. Numerous ways to achieve this task have been devised in the past
by man and the quest for better technologies continues. The latest one is to utilize the
chaotic laws of nature! i.e. bringing order out of chaos!!

Chaos.. every where
The seemingly random nature of the chaotic phenomenon was thought about, out of curiosity in
early days. Bringing in order out of chaos was never ever thought of by man. But as the technology improves, researchers are looking to bring out just this. The results are said to
be very encouraging. Under favourable conditions, initial tests were able to achieve giga-bit speeds over a few hundred kilometers.

Bringing order...
A unique feature of the chaotic system is that, even though they have a seemingly chaotic
nature as a whole, the immediate behavior is somewhat predictable. So this means, the near-term behaviour of the system can be made controllable. A simplest example uses the
Lorenz Attractor. As said above, by making a few changes inn the Lorenz system equations,the
system trace can be sent to one of the 'butter-fly wings'. If we consider one wing or lobe as '0' and the other as '1', the result is a very robust digital system! A receiver needs only to synchronize with the transmitter to receive the message.

The biggest advantage of such systems is that it is much more easier to to generate these chaotic signals. They are found to be robust than the conventional ones. It has been reported that the systems are difficult to crack into, due to the chaotic nature of the signal itself. It can be easily confused with the random noise. Add to it any common cryptographic technology, you get a very secure communication system.

The future may be resting on this still evolving phenomenon. Researchers have not fully understood the chaotic laws as on today. A better understanding could make way to a totally
secure, but chaotic way of communication!!