Digital echo-cancellation method and circuit arrangement

Abstract

A four-wire trunk line of a telephone network, operating with frequency-division multiplexing, is coupled by a hybrid coil to a local two-wire line and is provided, at a location separated from that hybrid coil by frequency modulators and demodulators, with an echo canceler connected across its receiving and transmitting branches. In order to eliminate frequency offset resulting from the incoherent modulation and demodulation, the echo canceler coacts with the phase-roll compensator comprising a phase-locking loop driven, during an acquisition phase, from a digital pilot-tone generator temporarily connected via a digital/analog converter to the receiving branch. The loop includes an analog/digital converter in the transmitting branch receiving the echo of the pilot tone due to hybrid-coil unbalance, a 90.degree. phase shifter and a delay line which are connected in parallel to the output of that converter and work into respective multipliers whose output signals are summed in a digital adder, another multiplier heterodyning the adder output with the pilot tone to produce a digital beat frequency, and a function generator feeding sine and cosine functions of that beat frequency to the multipliers that are respectively coupled to the phase shifter and to the delay line. The output signals from the loop adder pass through the echo canceler, which operates on them in a working phase, to another digital/analog converter inserted in the transmitting branch. In another embodiment the tasks of the phase-roll compensator are performed by a microprogrammed processor.