Reconfiguration requirements for high speed wireless communication systems

This paper focuses on the reconfiguration requirements of hardware platforms for high speed wireless communication systems. Due to the underlying trade-off between flexibility and efficiency, many reconfigurable hardware solutions and FPGA implementations are prone to significant energy and performance penalties in comparison to application specific hardware designs. These penalties can only be alleviated by designing reconfigurable architectures for selected applications fields, since each application field has only a limited set of flexibility requirements. In this paper the analysis is conducted for emerging wireless communication standards based on the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) or CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) transmission technique. The requirements for the physical and the medium access layers are analyzed separately. Focus is also set on different market segments.