Improving Power and Energy Efficiency of Linearly Equalized Baseband Cable Transmission Links

Telecommunication networks have been identified to exhibit a substantial electrical power and energy demand. Therefore it is important to utilize power and energy efficie nt systems as building blocks for such networks. In wired access networks copper cables are used for highspeed d ata transmission. Important technical indicators for power and energy efficiency of transmission systems are t r nsmit power and energy per bit. In this work it is investigated how transmit power and energy per bit in li nearly equalized multilevel baseband cable transmission systems can be minimized by exploiting degrees of fr eedom in the transmission link design for given throughput and transmission quality. First, the constella tion size is a degree of freedom: Its optimization leads to minimum values of transmit power and energy per bit depend ing on the interplay between throughput and band limitation of the cable. Second, the partitioning of th e equalization to transmitter and receiver is a degree of freedom: Here, a uniform distribution of the linear equal izing function is found to be optimum in terms of minimum transmit power or energy per bit at a given transmiss ion performance and quality. The results show that the optimization of constellation size and equalizati on partitioning leads to significant transmit power and energy-per-bit savings compared to conventional baseband c ble transmission systems.