10 Gbps transmission over standard category-5 copper cable

IEEE is interested in specifying the next generation 10Gbps copper cable Ethernet network, termed 10000BASE-T, in the not too distant future. In search of a proper solution, we are investigating the involved tradeoffs at every design step. This paper presents conceptual designs of a 10,000BASE-T copper transmission system for distribution of a digital signal over ~100 meters of a standard CAT-5 copper cable. These designs make it possible to achieve this at a target average bit error rate (BER) of 10 after equalization and decoding, using standard CAT-5 cable, if we adopt vectored transmission on 4 pairs. This is done in presence of insertion-loss dispersion, NEXT, FEXT, Alien NEXT, Echo and all the associated noise. To achieve this, the following tasks have been defined, MIMO cancellation of all crosstalk terms and iterative vector equalization and decoding of the received signals.