MIMO Time Domain Equalizer Design for Long Reach xDSL MIMO Channel Shortening

Abstract

In discrete multi-tone (DMT) transmission based digital subscriber line (DSL) systems, a cyclic prefix (CP) is added to each symbol before transmission, where the length of the CP is larger than the estimated channel impulse response (CIR) length. This ensures the elimination of inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) between the carriers of the same symbol, and allows for single tap frequency domain equalizers and crosstalk cancellation at the receiver. Recently, long reach xDSL (LR-xDSL) has been proposed to extend the reach of conventional DSL systems. With the extended loop lengths, the required CP length increases, in order to match the larger CIR length. The longer CP adds a large overhead and results in overall throughput loss. A more efficient way to deal with extended loop lengths is to use a channel shortening filter - commonly referred as a time domain equalizer (TEQ), to reduce the length of the CIR to the length of CP. This paper focuses on minimum mean square error (MMSE) based multiple input multiple output (MIMO) TEQ design for LR-xDSL MIMO channel shortening. Constraints are applied to the minimization problem to eliminate the trivial solution. This paper proposes two new constraints for the MMSE based MIMO TEQ design for upstream scenarios, which result in a lower complexity and provide better (or similar) performance compared to existing MMSE based MIMO TEQ design methods. Furthermore, a diagonal MIMO TEQ with lower memory requirement and lower computational complexity is presented based on the proposed constraints, which can be applied in upstream as well as downstream scenarios.