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