A simple byte-erasure method for improved impulse immunity in DSL

The data that is transmitted in DSL system is subject to corruption by impulse noise, i.e., noise bursts of high energy that interfere with the transmitted symbols. As DSL data rates increase the crosstalk mitigation techniques become more sophisticated, impulse noise limits service in terms of rate or delay. Because of the highly non-stationary nature of impulse noise, a combination of interleaving and Reed-Solomon coding is currently used to shield systems from noise burst. This paper presents a modified impulse noise protection algorithm that takes advantage of the improved performance of Reed-Solomon codes when the location of the impaired bytes is known. Without changing the structure of the encoder or the interleaver, it is shown that the delay, or equivalently the overhead due to forward error correction coding, can be reduced without compromising the immunity of the system to impulses. A DMT-VDSL system is used as a particular example of the improvement achieved using byte-erasure.