US Patent 7075999 Multicarrier modulation with data dependent frequency-domain redundancy

A modem (10) for transmitting a discrete multitone modulated (DMT) signal over a communications channel (H) is disclosed. In the encoding of an input bitstream, unloaded subchannels in the DMT spectrum are assigned signal values so that a trailing portion of each block or frame of the resulting datastream are forced to a known value, for example zero. The known-valued trailing portion of each block provides the effect of a cyclic prefix, without necessitating the prepending of an actual cyclic prefix and incurring the corresponding data rate loss; alternatively, the effect of a cyclic prefix can be augmented by the forcing of the trailing portion of the blocks to known values.