Error Sign Feedback as an Alternative to Pilots for the Tracking of FEXT Transfer Functions in Downstream VDSL

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Error Sign Feedback as an Alternative to Pilots for the Tracking of FEXT Transfer Functions in Downstream VDSL J. Louveaux and A.-J. van der Veen Delft University of Technology, 2600AA Delft, The Netherlands Received 1 December 2004; Revised 11 August 2005; Accepted 22 August 2005 With increasing bandwidths and decreasing loop lengths, crosstalk becomes the main impairment in VDSL systems. For downstream communication, crosstalk precompensation techniques have been designed to cope with this issue by using the collocation of the transmitters. These techniques naturally need an accurate estimation of the crosstalk channel impulse responses. We investigate the issue of tracking these channels. Due to the lack of coordination between the receivers, and because the amplitude levels of the remaining interference from crosstalk after precompensation are very low, blind estimation schemes are inefficient in this case. So some part of the upstream or downstream bit rate needs to be used to help the estimation. In this paper, we design a new algorithm to try to limit the bandwidth used for the estimation purpose by exploiting the collocation at the transmitter side. The principle is to use feedback from the receiver to the transmitter instead of using pilots in the downstream signal. It is justified by computing the Cramer-Rao lower bound on the estimation error variance and showing that, for the levels of power in consideration, and for a given bit rate used to help the estimation, this bound is effectively lower for the proposed scheme. A simple algorithm based on the maximum likelihood is proposed. Its performance is analyzed in detail and is compared to a classical scheme using pilot symbols. Finally, an improved but more complex version is proposed to approach the performance bound. Copyright © 2006 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

1.

INTRODUCTION

Future DSL systems such as VDSL (very high-bit-rate digital subscriber line) evolve towards shorter loops thanks to the increasing development of optical fiber infrastructure. This allows the use of higher bandwidths, typically from 10 to as high as 30 MHz for very short loops. At these high frequencies and low attenuation channels, the FEXT (farend crosstalk) becomes the main degradation in the system, higher than additive noise. In order to overcome this issue, multiuser detectors can be designed [1] when the receivers are coordinated, that is, when the receivers have access to the signals coming from all the different lines. However, in typical downstream VDSL systems, the receivers will not be coordinated. For this reason, a number of precancellation techniques have been designed to decrease the effect of FEXT [2– 4] using the coordination at the CO (central office) and assuming no coordination at the receiver side. These systems are quite different than in the MIMO wireless case because each receiver can only use the signal from its own line. So each receiver essentially sees a MISO channel. In addition, the physical characteristics of the VDSL channel ensur