This paper will begin the Special Session by introducing the topics to be covered and then more particularly will present some of the author's recent work on exact and accurate conditional Gaussian approximations for BER, likelihood decoding, and the communications use of optical chaos. There will be two general themes to the session, one of improving existing theory of BER performance and one covering the latest application developments of chaos-based communications to ultra wide-band radio and cooperative personal networks. The main system used for exemplification will be multi-user antipodal chaos shift-keying, both in coherent and noncoherent forms, and also with some modifications including frequency modulated chaos shift-keying and error correcting. Other topics of the session include highly accurate approximate BER results with channel fading, the role of nonconstant bit energy, and optimal spreading.