Throughput and Delay Performance of DSL Broadband Access with Cross-Layer Dynamic Spectrum Management

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DSL broadband access suffers from crosstalk among different lines within the same cable bundle. Dynamic spectrum management (DSM) refers to a set of techniques to mitigate the impact of crosstalk leading to spectacular performance gains. DSM research has mainly aimed at physical layer performance metrics, such as data rates and transmit powers. However, for many applications higher-layer performance metrics, such as throughput and delay, may be much more important to improve user satisfaction. In this paper, we provide a cross-layer DSM framework to study throughput and delay performance by looking at scheduling and DSM together. We show how optimal scheduling can be combined with both optimal and suboptimal DSM and provide throughput-optimal scheduling algorithms which require only polynomial complexity. We analytically study the impact on delay performance of achieving throughput-optimality with suboptimal DSM compared to optimal DSM. We then present extensions that significantly improve delay performance by exploiting the specific structure of the problem, such as the temporal-spectral correlation property. Furthermore, we propose a second cross-layer DSM framework that achieves throughput-optimal scheduling with suboptimal DSM, but in addition also significantly reduces overall power consumption. Finally, we analyze and quantify the tradeoff between throughput, delay and power consumption for concrete DSL scenarios.