Multiuser soft interference canceler via iterative decoding for DSL applications

This paper presents a method to mitigate interference on a transmission system by another system with an overlapping frequency band. The systems are uncoordinated so that they cannot be made to transmit in orthogonal coding space. The transmission environment is an interference channel rather than the multiaccess channel often considered in other multiuser detection problems, for instance at the base station of a code division multiple access wireless system. Using the fact that the inputs are all from discrete constellations, it is possible to perform a multiuser maximum-likelihood (ML) detector to decode the signals from the system of interest with low probability of error. However, the ML detector often requires impractical computation. A soft linear canceler is instead used to reduce the interference with a small loss of bandwidth in the system of interest. The method has much lower complexity than a full-blown ML detector, and the soft canceler performance is close to a ML detector. The method is demonstrated on a very-high-speed digital subscriber lines system with a home local area network interference. The system of interest is using a multicarrier modulation transmission scheme such as discrete multitone, while the interfering system transmits using quadrature amplitude modulation.