Use of Chaotic Oscillations for Precoding and Synchronization in OFDM

. This paper proposes a novel linear precoding method for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based on the employment of the chaotic waveforms generated by the fourth-order chaotic oscillator and orthonormalized by the Gram-Schmidt process. The proposed linear precoding method is aimed to increase resilience to the multipath propagation issues and reduce the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signal. Moreover, the chaotic waveform enables novel timing synchronization methods to be implemented in the receiver. The modeling of baseband Linear Precoded OFDM (LP-OFDM) data transmission system with Rayleigh channel has been performed in Simulink en-vironment to validate the proposed method and to compare the performance to the classic precoding methods, such as Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT). Experiments have shown that in a high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) scenario, the employment of the novel precoding scheme allows reducing Bit Error Ratio (BER) by several dB compared to non-precoded OFDM. The proposed precoding method leads to the reduction of PAPR; however, it is not as efficient as classical precoding schemes, such as WHT. Experimental evidence of synchronization of the chaotic oscillators within 50 samples long time interval is presented.