Isochronal synchrony and bidirectional communication with delay-coupled nonlinear oscillators.

We propose a basic mechanism for isochronal synchrony and communication with mutually delay-coupled chaotic systems. We show that two Ikeda ring oscillators, mutually coupled with a propagation delay, synchronize isochronally when both are symmetrically driven by a third Ikeda oscillator. This synchronous operation, unstable in the two delay-coupled oscillators alone, facilitates simultaneous, bidirectional communication of messages with chaotic carrier wave forms. This approach to combine both bidirectional and unidirectional coupling represents an application of generalized synchronization using a mediating drive signal for a spatially distributed and internally synchronized multicomponent system.