Channel equalization to achieve high bit rates in discrete multitone systems

textMulticarrier modulation (MCM) techniques such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and discrete multi-tone (DMT) modulation are attractive for high-speed data communications due to the ease with which MCM can combat channel dispersion. With all the benefits MCM could give, DMT modulation has an extra ability to perform dynamic bit loading, which has the potential to exploit fully the available bandwidth in a slowly time-varying channel. In broadband wireline communications, DMT modulation is standardized for asymmetric digital subscribe line (ADSL) and very-high-bit-rate digital subscriber line (VDSL) modems. ADSL and VDSL standards are used by telephone companies to provide high speed data service to residences and offices. In an ADSL receiver, an equalizer is required to compensate for the channel’s dispersion in the time domain and the channel’s distortion in the frequency domain of the transmitted waveform. This dissertation proposes design methods for linear equalizers to increase the bit rate of the connection. The methods are amenable to implementation on programmable fixed-point digital signal processors, which are employed in ADSL/VDSL transceivers. A conventional ADSL equalizer consists of a time-domain equalizer, a fast Fourier transform, and a frequency domain equalizer. The time domain equalizer (TEQ) is a finite impulse response filter that when coupled with a discretized channel produces an equivalent channel whose impulse response is shorter than that of the discretized channel. This channel shortening is required by the ADSL standards. In this dissertation, I first propose a linear phase TEQ design that exploits symmetry in existing eigen-filter approaches such as minimum mean square error(MMSE), maximum shortening signal to noise ratio (MSSNR) and minimum intersymbol interference (Min-ISI) equalizers. TEQs with symmetric coefficients can reach the same performance as non-symmetric ones with much lower training complexity. Second, I improve Min-ISI design. I reformulate the cost function to make long TEQs design feasible. I remove the dependency of transmission delay in order to reduce the complexity associated with delay optimization. The quantized weighting is introduced to further lower the complexity. I also propose an iterative optimization procedure of Min-ISI that completely avoids Cholesky decomposition hence is better suited for a fixed-point implementation. Finally I propose a dual-path TEQ structure, which designs a standard singleFIR TEQ to achieve good bit rate over the entire transmission bandwidth, and designs another FIR TEQ to improve the bit rate over a subset of subcarriers. Dualpath TEQ can be viewed as a special case of a complex valued filter bank structure that delivers the best bit rate of existing DMT equalizers. However, dual-path TEQ provides a very good tradeoff between achievable bit rate vs. implementation complexity on a programmable digital signal processor.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

An improved channel model for ADSL and VDSL systems

This paper examines existing channel models used with xDSL systems and identifies a key shortcoming - namely, the implicit assumption that all impulse noise originates at the transmitter. Based on extensive data collected from the local loop, a new model is proposed which addresses this problem by combining a digital filter model of the transmission line with a distributed noise source. This better reflects the nature of a real telephone line, and thus provides a more solid basis for simulation and optimisation of xDSL systems

Multi-User Signal and Spectra Coordination for Digital Subscriber Lines

The appetite amongst consumers for ever higher data-rates seems insatiable. This booming market presents a huge opportunity for telephone and cable operators. It also presents a challenge: the delivery of broadband services to millions of customers across sparsely populated areas. Fully fibre-based networks, whilst technically the most advanced solution, are prohibitively expensive to deploy. Digital subscriber lines (DSL) provide an alternative solution. Seen as a stepping-stone to a fully fibre-based network, DSL operates over telephone lines that are already in place, minimizing the cost of deployment. The basic principle behind DSL technology is to increase data-rate by widening the transmission bandwidth. Unfortunately, operating at high frequencies, in a medium originally designed for voice-band transmission, leads to crosstalk between the different DSLs. Crosstalk is typically 10-15 dB larger than the background noise and is the dominant source of performance degradation in DSL. This thesis develops practical multi-user techniques for mitigating crosstalk in DSL. The techniques proposed have low complexity, low latency, and are compatible with existing customer premises equipment (CPE). In addition to being practical, the techniques also yield near-optimal performance, operating close to the theoretical multi-user channel capacity. Multi-user techniques are based on the coordination of the different users in a network, and this can be done on either a spectral or signal level

Physical Layer Techniques for High Frequency Wireline Broadband Systems

This thesis collects contributions to wireline and wireless communication systems with an emphasis on multiuser and multicarrier physical layer technology. To deliver increased capacity, modern wireline access systems such as G.fast extend the signal bandwidth up from tens to hundreds of MHz. This ambitious development revealed a number of unforeseen hurdles such as the impact of impedance changes in various forms. Impedance changes have a strong effect on the performance of multi-user crosstalk mitigation techniques such as vectoring. The first part of the thesis presents papers covering the identification of one of these problems, a model describing why it occurs and a method to mitigate its effects, improving line stability for G.fast systems.A second part of the thesis deals with the effects of temperature changes on wireline channels. When a vectored (MIMO) wireline system is initialized, channel estimates need to be obtained. This thesis presents contributions on the feasibility of re-using channel coefficients to speed up the vectoring startup procedures, even after the correct coefficients have changed, e.g., due to temperature changes. We also present extensive measurement results showing the effects of temperature changes on copper channels using a temperature chamber and British cables. The last part of the thesis presents three papers on the convergence of physical layer technologies, more specifically the deployment of OFDM-based radio systems using twisted pairs in different ways. In one proposed scenario, the idea of using the access copper lines to deploy small cells inside users' homes is explored. The feasibility of the concept, the design of radio-heads and a practical scheme for crosstalk mitigation are presented in three contributions

Orthogonal transmultiplexers : extensions to digital subscriber line (DSL) communications

An orthogonal transmultiplexer which unifies multirate filter bank theory and communications theory is investigated in this dissertation. Various extensions of the orthogonal transmultiplexer techniques have been made for digital subscriber line communication applications. It is shown that the theoretical performance bounds of single carrier modulation based transceivers and multicarrier modulation based transceivers are the same under the same operational conditions. Single carrier based transceiver systems such as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and Carrierless Amplitude and Phase (CAP) modulation scheme, multicarrier based transceiver systems such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) or Discrete Multi Tone (DMT) and Discrete Subband (Wavelet) Multicarrier based transceiver (DSBMT) techniques are considered in this investigation. The performance of DMT and DSBMT based transceiver systems for a narrow band interference and their robustness are also investigated. It is shown that the performance of a DMT based transceiver system is quite sensitive to the location and strength of a single tone (narrow band) interference. The performance sensitivity is highlighted in this work. It is shown that an adaptive interference exciser can alleviate the sensitivity problem of a DMT based system. The improved spectral properties of DSBMT technique reduces the performance sensitivity for variations of a narrow band interference. It is shown that DSBMT technique outperforms DMT and has a more robust performance than the latter. The superior performance robustness is shown in this work. Optimal orthogonal basis design using cosine modulated multirate filter bank is discussed. An adaptive linear combiner at the output of analysis filter bank is implemented to eliminate the intersymbol and interchannel interferences. It is shown that DSBMT is the most suitable technique for a narrow band interference environment. A blind channel identification and optimal MMSE based equalizer employing a nonmaximally decimated filter bank precoder / postequalizer structure is proposed. The performance of blind channel identification scheme is shown not to be sensitive to the characteristics of unknown channel. The performance of the proposed optimal MMSE based equalizer is shown to be superior to the zero-forcing equalizer

Iterative receiver based on SAGE algorithm for crosstalk cancellation in upstream vectored VDSL

We propose the use of an iterative receiver based on the Space Alternating Generalized Expectation maximization (SAGE) algorithm for crosstalk cancellation in upstream vectored VDSL. In the absence of alien crosstalk, we show that when initialized with the frequency-domain equalizer (FEQ) output, the far-end crosstalk (FEXT) can be cancelled with no more real-time complexity than the existing linear receivers. In addition, the suggested approach does not require offline computation of the channel inverse and thus reduces the receiver complexity. In the presence of alien crosstalk, there is a significant gap between the rate performance of the linear receivers as compared with the single-user bound (SUB). The proposed receiver is shown to successfully bridge this gap while requiring only a little extracomplexity. Computer simulations are presented to validate the analysis and confirm the performance of the proposed receiver

Mitigation of impulsive noise for SISO and MIMO G.fast system

To address the demand for high bandwidth data transmission over telephone transmission lines, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has recently completed the fourth generation broadband (4GBB) copper access network technology, known as G.fast. Throughout this thesis, extensively investigates the wired broadband G.fast coding system and the novel impulsive noise reduction technique has been proposed to improve the performance of wired communications network in three different scenarios: single-line Discrete Multiple Tone (DMT)- G.fast system; a multiple input multiple-output (MIMO) DMTG.fast system, and MIMO G.fast system with different crosstalk cancellation methods. For each of these scenarios, however, Impulsive Noise (IN) is considered as the main limiting factor of performance system. In order to improve the performance of such systems, which use higher order QAM constellation such as G.fast system, this thesis examines the performance of DMT G.fast system over copper channel for six different higher signal constellations of M = 32, 128, 512, 2048, 8192 and 32768 in presence of IN modelled as the Middleton Class A (MCA) noise source. In contrast to existing work, this thesis presents and derives a novel equation of Optimal Threshold (OT) to improve the IN frequency domain mitigation methods applied to the G.fast standard over copper channel with higher QAM signal constellations. The second scenario, Multi-Line Copper Wire (MLCW) G.fast is adopted utilizing the proposed MLCW Chen model and is compared to a single line G-fast system by a comparative analysis in terms of Bit-Error-Rate(BER) performance of implementation of MLCW-DMT G.fast system. The third scenario, linear and non-linear crosstalk crosstalk interference cancellation methods are applied to MLCW G.fas and compared by a comparative analysis in terms of BER performance and the complexity of implementation.University of Technology for choosing me for their PhD scholarship and The Higher Committee For Education Development in Iraq(HCED