Reconfigurable Wireless PHY with Dynamically Controlled Out-of-Band Emission on Zynq SoC

After successful deployment in 4G and WiFi, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based physical layer (PHY) is preferred for 5G and next-generation WiFi due to its low complexity, simple receiver, and compatibility with legacy systems. However, poor spectrum utilization of OFDM due to high out-of-band emissions (OOBE) is a concern. In this paper, we address this by augmenting OFDM PHY with low-complexity windowing and filtering approaches and implement the same on the Zynq system-on-chip (SoC). The proposed reconfigurable architecture allows on-the-fly tuning of the OOBE by dynamically controlling window and filter characteristics. We demonstrate the functional correctness of the architecture via power spectral density and bit-error-rate analysis for different signal-to-noise ratios, word-length, filter order, and window type. Lower resource utilization, power consumption, and high-speed reconfiguration demonstrate the superiority of the proposed reconfigurable architecture over conventional architectures.