Research of hybrid WDM-PON data transmission system with embedded ASE-powered stealth channels for steganography applications

Abstract The frequency spectrum is becoming busier, thereby it might be appealing for more and more, for instance, eavesdroppers to try to gather some valuable data or identify the transmission frequencies for this specific data. To mitigate the possible risks concerning that, not only data encryption but also hiding of the data channels (creation of stealth channels) is necessary. For the success of stealth signal integration, channel spacing, and power customization is required. During this research, in the simulation environment, we show a successful realization of the 8-channel 10 Gbit/s non-return-to-zero on–off keying (NRZ-OOK) modulated wavelength-division-multiplexed passive optical network (WDM-PON) with the embedded additional amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) powered hidden 7-channel 2.5 Gbit/s NRZ-OOK modulated spectrum-sliced data transmission system. Such as a hybrid optical transmission system can be used to improve the protection of sensitive data. Our results show that the introduction of the stealth data transmission system leads to an estimated power penalty below 0.02 dB at the pre-FEC BER level of 10−3, which may be considered as negligible and shows the viability of this hybrid system. The proposed approach can be applied not only in the WDM-PON architecture but also in other types of fiber optical access or metro-access systems.