Discrete Multi-Tone Digital Subscriber Loop Performance in the Face of Impulsive Noise

As an important solution to "the last mile'' access, digital subscriber loops (DSLs) are still maintained in a huge plant to support low-cost but high-quality broadband network access through telephone lines. The discrete multi-tone (DMT) transmissions constitute a baseband version of the ubiquitous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. While the DMT is ideally suited to deal with the frequency selective channel in DSL, the presence of bursty impulsive noise tends to severely degrade the transmission performance. In this paper, we analyze the statistics of impulsive noise and its effects on the received signals, with the aid of a hidden semi-Markov process. The closed-form bit error rate expression is derived for the DMT system for Q-ary quadrature amplitude modulation under practical noise conditions and for measured dispersive DSL channels. Instead of relying on the simplified stationary and impulsive noise process, our noise model considers both the temporal and spectral characteristics based on the measurement results. The simulation results confirm the accuracy of the formulas derived and quantify the impact both of the impulsive noise and of the dispersive channel in DSL.