Semi-Blind Power Allocation for Digital Subscriber Lines

Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) are today one of the most important means for delivering high-speed data transmission. An emerging technique for dealing with one of the technology's most harmful problems, crosstalk, is Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM). DSM literature already counts with some half a dozen important solutions. These solutions can be classified according to four different aspects: optimality, computational cost, distribution and required crosstalk channel information. In this paper, the authors present an algorithm, named semi-blind spectrum balancing, which achieves a compelling trade-off between these four aspects. The scheme is based on the idea of optimization against a virtual line, a fictitious line to represent the damage caused to other users in the network.