10 Gbps transmission over standard category-5 copper cable

IEEE is interested in specifying the next generation 10 Gbps copper cable Ethernet network, termed 10000BASE-T, in the not too distant future. In search of a proper solution, we are investigating the involved tradeoffs at every design step. The paper presents conceptual designs of a 10000BASE-T copper transmission system for distribution of a digital signal over ∼100 meters of a standard CAT-5 copper cable. These designs make it possible to achieve this at a target average bit error rate (BER) of 10^-10 after equalization and decoding, using standard CAT-5 cable, if we adopt vectored transmission on 4 pairs. This is done in the presence of insertion-loss dispersion, NEXT, FEXT, alien NEXT, echo and all the associated noise. To achieve this, the following tasks have been defined: MIMO cancellation of all crosstalk terms; iterative vector equalization and decoding of the received signals.