The FAST Copper Project

http://www.princeton.edu/fastcopper/index.html
'FAST Copper' is a research project jointly pursued by Mung Chiang (Princeto
n University), Alexander Fraser (Fraser Research Institute), and John Cioffi
(Stanford University), funded by U.S. National Science Foundation's Informa
tion Technology Research program 2004-2008 with NSF Grant 0427677.
Access networks are often the rate-reach-reliability-quality bottleneck of e
nd-to-end connections in wide area networks. Realizing the vision of truly b
roadband and ubiquitous access to almost everyone in the U.S. is a formidabl
e task, with many significant technical and socio-economic challenges. Altho
ugh the fiber-to-the-home solutions promise to provide broadband delivery, t
he labor costs associated with fiber installation need to be divided over th
e number of customers served by the fiber. Such cost becomes increasingly ex
pensive as the number of customers served decreases, which happens when fibe
r gets closer and closer to the customer, especially in suburban areas. That
last segment labor cost of deployment is the dominant economic limitation i
n broadband access, especially given the population density in established s
uburban neighborhoods in U.S.
This goal will be achieved through two threads of research: dynamic and join
t optimization of resources in Frequency, Amplitude, Space, and Time (thus t
he name ‘FAST’) to overcome the attenuation and crosstalk bottlenecks, and
the integration of communication, networking, computation, modeling, and di
stributed information management for architectural design of broadband acces
s networks.
Main Results

Autonomous Spectrum Balancing: a distributed, low complexity, convergent, ne
ar-optimal solution to multi-carrier interference channel spectrum managemen
t
Algorithm for admission control, statistical multiplexing, and scheduling am
ong users
A taxonomy of 16 graph theory problems of survivable tree design, solution t
o two of them
Solution to Broadcast Capacity Region problem for Gaussian channel proof of
capacity region constructive algorithms to realize any point applicable to 1
00 Mbps Plus DSL copper links
Band Preference distributed spectrum design for interference channels achiev
es best (non successively decoded) interference channel problem easily and w
ith little or no coordination among users applicable to high-speed DSL syste
ms
Introduction of single-wire 250 Mbps symmetric DSLs at 500m range using phan
tom shield circuits
QPS (queue proportional scheduling methods) -- Recipients (with ChanSoo Hwan
g, supported by Samsung) of ICC 2006 Best Paper Award (K. Seong and J. Cioff
i)