Reduced-delay protection of DSL systems against nonstationary disturbances

In addition to being designed to successfully cope with stationary noise, crosstalk, and intersymbol interference, digital subscriber loop (DSL) systems need to be shielded from nonstationary disturbances, such as impulse noise and RF interference. Currently, deployed DSL systems achieve protection against nonstationary interference using a combination of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes and interleaving. However, interleaving results in delay. Long delays are undesirable in high-rate systems that support interactive applications. In this study, it is shown that the interleaving delay of DSL systems can be significantly reduced by performing erasure decoding of the RS codewords at the receiver. Three different techniques for determining the erasures are proposed. Use of the techniques results in a reduction of the interleaving delay that is required to mitigate worst-case impulse noise by up to a factor of 2, which is verified by simulation. Moreover, the techniques do not require any changes at the transmitter and therefore guarantee compatibility with currently deployed systems.