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.