Advanced Signal Processing for Digital Subscriber Lines

Abstract

The recent deployment of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology around the world is rapidly making broadband access for the mass consumer market a reality. The ever-growing customer demand for higher data rates has been fueled by the popularity of applications like peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing networks and video-streaming and high-definition television (HDTV). DSL technology allows telephone operators to getmaximum leverage out of their existing infrastructure by delivering broadband access over existing twisted-pair telephone lines. At the heart of DSL lies a plethora of signal processing techniques which enable such high-speed transmission to be achieved over a medium originally designed with only voice-band transmission in mind. These advanced signal processing techniques address many challenges that exist in DSL networks today, such as the near-end and far-end crosstalk (NEXT/FEXT), impulse noise, peak-toaverage-power ratio (PAR), intersymbol and intercarrier interference (ISI/ICI), radio-frequency interference (RFI), and so forth. The goal of this special issue is to discuss the state-of-the-art and recent advances in signal processing techniques for DSL.