Joint Level 2 and 3 Dynamic Spectrum Management for Downstream DSL

In this paper, we investigate joint level 2 and 3 dynamic spectrum management (joint DSM 2/3) for downstream (DS) DSL. We consider a DS scenario in which users are divided into a few separate groups, where vector encoding based signal coordination can be applied in each group and spectrum coordination is possible for all users. This can be seen as a mixed interference/broadcast channel (IF/BC) scenario. In order to obtain the optimal transmitter structure, we develop a generalized duality between the vector broadcast and multiple-access channel (MAC) for scenarios in which partial signal coordination is available among users. This theory together with optimal spectrum balancing (OSB) is exploited to calculate the jointly optimal filters and transmit powers for non-linear vector dirty paper coding structures (in the form of Tomlinson-Harashima precoder (THP)) in the groups. The proposed scheme is compared to several other joint DSM 2/3 algorithms for DS DSL. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme (referred to as the IF/BC-OSB algorithm) achieves considerably higher bit rates than the other schemes. IF/BC-OSB encompasses the earlier developed BC-OSB algorithm as a special case. A simplified version of IF/BC-OSB avoiding exhaustive search with near-optimal performance is also proposed.