Controlled aliasing to simplify service selection

Abstract

A system and method for a handshake protocol for digital subscriber line (DSL) and similar telecommunication systems that makes beneficial use of aliasing to select and decode signaling tones. In particular, the invention carefully selects signaling tones at frequencies such that higher frequency tones would alias down and coincide with specific base tones after sub-sampling. Thus, rather than filtering out higher frequencies to avoid aliasing, aliasing is exploited to use these higher frequencies. This technique would allow a receiver to detect and decode the higher frequency tones at lower frequency tone locations or bands. A related innovation is a band set, which includes one or more tones within a particular frequency band, where typically each tone in a band set corresponds to a different tone set. Exploiting the effects of aliasing eliminates the need to search for compatible spectrum, simplifies receiver design, provides flexibility, scalability and future-proofing, and allows handshaking sessions to be established across mutually exclusive spectrums. The invention is particularly useful for DSL systems, and in particular is well suited for the proposed G.hs standard.