Energy management of DSL systems: Experimental findings

We present a measurement study of the energy consumption of an operator-side digital subscriber line (DSL) board under various conditions of data rate and power spectral density, with and without vectoring. The results highlight practical opportunities and challenges for optimizing rate-power-stability tradeoffs in DSL access systems, complementing simulation-based studies focused on energy reduction through spectral optimization. We validate models for line board consumption that can be tied with line driver consumption based on the aggregate transmit power of each line, and demonstrate that near-optimal rate-power-stability tradeoffs can be obtained through external line management of data rate, Signal-to-Noise-Ratio margin and power spectral density parameters.