Vectored transmission for digital subscriber line systems

This paper describes the “vectored” transmission technique for digital subscriber line (DSL) systems, which utilizes user coordination at the central office or optical network unit. This method exploits the colocation of the downstream transmitters and of the upstream receivers, in order to achieve far-end crosstalk (FEXT) cancellation and perform multiuser transmission optimization. The performance improvements are particularly pronounced in environments with strong FEXT such as in very high-speed DSL. Discrete multitone is employed for each user with additional constraints on the cyclic prefix length and with the assumption of block-synchronized transmission and reception for downstream and upstream transmission correspondingly. Within each tone, upstream crosstalk is removed by multiple-input–multiple-output decision feedback at the receiving side, while downstream crosstalk is eliminated by analogous preprocessing at the transmitting side. Additionally, the issue of transmission energy allocation in frequency and among users is addressed. Assuming frequency-division duplexing, the corresponding optimization problem is formulated and solved via convex programming both for a fixed upstream–downstream band plan and for a dynamically programmable band plan. The case of power backoff as a means to reduce the impact of crosstalk on alien systems is also treated. Interestingly, the performance of the proposed methods is shown to be very close to known information theory bounds.