Robust Spectrum Management for DMT-Based Systems

In recent years an increasing effort was made to reduce the energy consumption in digital subscriber line equipment. Dynamic spectrum management (DSM) has been identified as one promising method to achieve energy-efficiency in discrete multitone based systems. An open research question is how to ensure system robustness when applying highly optimized energy-efficient spectrum management. In this paper, we study the problem of uncertainty in crosstalk noise and parameters, the knowledge of which is indispensable for many DSM algorithms. We introduce robust optimization for spectrum balancing as a technique to achieve feasibility of the optimal power-allocation under a deterministic parameter uncertainty model. This can be seen as an extension of current schemes for spectrum balancing. As a special case we consider the simple strategy of scaling the crosstalk parameters to their worst-case values, which corresponds to a specific uncertainty model and entails no changes to current DSM algorithms. Finally, we quantify the benefit in worst-case performance and the price in terms of energy by simulations.