A reconfigurable hybrid hardware/software architecture for EFM/Ethernet

With the growing demands of data network users, the existing broadband access technologies may not satisfy subscriberspsila expectations any more. Multiple protocol translations in access networks reduce the network performance considerably. EFM (Ethernet in the First Mile) has been introduced to mitigate this problem by extending Ethernet from local networks to access networks. EFM and Ethernet are similar in data link layer; hence, making an EFM/Ethernet reconfigurable system appears to be cost-effective. On the other hand, hardware/software co-design is usually a preferred approach in system design when we seek an optimized solution. In this paper, a hybrid hardware/software architecture is proposed for a reconfigurable EFM/Ethernet transceiver. The reconfigurability of the end-system was taken into account while doing hardware/software partitioning. Our proposed architecture has been validated through experiments. The results show that the proposed architecture is a viable solution to be implemented and used by broadband access networkspsila subscribers.