DSL networks have played a key role in the last 15 years in providing broadband connectivity and expanding the public's access to internet resources. Signal processing techniques have been instrumental in enabling high speed transmission over copper and meeting the growing bandwidth demand. A new bandwidth demand step is expected in the next five years as IP networks are taking over the transport of voice and entertainment signals. The next challenge for DSL is whether signal processing and physical layer technologies can further advance to address this new demand, or whether copper networks will simply not be able to support higher rates and will reach the end of their usefulness. In this talk, current performance bottlenecks will be discussed and promising new techniques will be reviewed. The problem of crosstalk mitigation will be discussed in further detail, which presents one of the major obstacles in reaching higher performance. This problem has spurred an active area of research involving the application of MIMO techniques, vectored transmission and dynamic spectral management to the DSL environment. A summary of the state of the art in this research area in industry and academia will be presented.

Michail Tsatsanis is a founder and Chief Scientist of Aktino, a company developing next generation DSL transceiver technology. Prior to that he was with Voyan Technology, where he served as Chief Scientist and Chief Technical Officer. From 1995 to 2000 he was with Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ, were he served as an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering. At Stevens he directed the Department's Wireless Laboratory and made research contributions in the area of multiuser detection and random access wireless networks. He is the author of more than 80 peer reviewed papers, three book chapters and several patents. At Voyan he led a technology team that successfully implemented and demonstrated the first next generation MIMO vectored transceiver in the DSL space. He has received a number of distinctions including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and two IEEE Best Paper Awards. He has served the IEEE in various capacities including the position of Associate Editor for two IEEE Transactions, member of the Signal Processing for Communications Committee and Chair of workshop organizing committees. He has also served and contributed in various DSL standardization committees of the ITU and ANSI-T1. Dr. Tsatsanis holds a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia.