High speed communication on twisted-pair wires and low complexity multiuser detectors

Abstract: This thesis deals with two different topics: High speed communication on twisted pair wires (digital subscriber lines) and low complexity multiuser detectors. The major part of this thesis concerns a technique for high speed communication over the telephone network called Very high bit rate Digital Subscriber Line VDSL). VDSL is not standardized yet but it is intended to offer bit rates up to 52 Mbit per second on twisted-pair wires. An important problem in VDSL is crosstalk between wire pairs, especially Near End Cross Talk (NEXT). A novel duplex method, called Zipper, that mitigates NEXT is presented herein. Zipper is a flexible duplex method that has high duplex efficiency and offers compatibility with existing services. It is based on Discrete Multi Tone (DMT) modulation, and uses different subcarriers in the two different transmission directions. The method relies on an additional cyclic extension to ensure orthogonality between the transmission directions. Zipper achieves best performance when all transmitters in the access network are synchronized, but it can also operate in an asynchronous mode with only a small loss in performance. Another important issue for VDSL is the problem with Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). The copper wires can act as large antennas and hence can transmit and receive radio signals. Herein the problem of radio frequency signals interfering with VDSL systems (called RFI-ingress) is addressed. The proposed method for suppressing the RFI works in the frequency domain of the DMT-receiver and can be used by any DMT-based VDSL system. By modeling the RFI and measuring the disturbance on some unmodulated subcarriers we can extrapolate and subtract the disturbance on all the other subcarriers. For a typical scenario with an average Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of 30 dB without RFI, about 20 dB can be lost due to RFI, but with the presented RFI-canceller this SNR-loss is reduced to less than 1 dB. The last part of this thesis deals with low complexity multiuser detection in a direct sequence code division multiple access system. The Maximum Likelihood Sequence Detector (MLSD) gives very good performance but is known to be very computationally complex. The detector presented herein is a simple threshold detector that makes MLSD-decisions on some, but not necessarily all, bits. A pipelined structure of the detector is presented which is attractive from an implementation point of view, since it allows parallel processing of the data. Using a single-user matched filter detector as post processor, taking care of the previously undetected bits, a complete multiuser detector with very low complexity is achieved. This detector gives better performance than the decorrelator receiver for a limited number of simultaneous users, e.g. up to 25 users with a spreading factor of 127.