Design issues toward a cost effective physical layer for multiband OFDM (ECMA-368) in consumer products

The creation of wireless personal area networks (WPANs) offers the consumer electronics industry a mechanism to truly unwire consumer products, leading to portability and ease of installation as never seen before. WPAN's can offer data-rates exceeding those that are required to convey high quality broadcast video, thus users can easily connect to high quality video for multimedia presentations in education, libraries, advertising, or have a wireless connection at home. There have been many WPAN proposals, but this paper concentrates on ECMA-368 as this standard has the largest industrial and implementers' forum backing. With the aim to define and create cost effective consumer electronic equipment this paper discusses the technology behind ECMA-368 physical layer, the design freedom availabilities, the required processing, buffer memory requirements and implementation considerations while concentrating on supporting all the offered data-rates