Wireless Transceiver Architecture

3 The Wireless Standards Point of View

A final set of constraints that drive the functionalities to be embedded in a transceiver as well as their performance come from the requirements set by the wireless standard we want to address. Those requirements are in fact mainly driven by two aspects of a wireless system. We need to ensure on the one hand a sufficiently high quality for the wireless link for the reliable transfer of data, and on the other hand that this quality remains sufficiently high for a given user while coexisting with other users. Such other users may or may not belong to the same wireless system.

From that perspective, it is interesting to see that medium access strategies have a deep impact on the transceiver architectures as well as on their ultimate performance. It is also interesting to see that common metrics have been derived to put numbers on the ability of a wireless transceiver to fulfill those two goals. We give a quick overview of the classical metrics in order to understand the underlying network system constraints. These metrics are used throughout the rest of this book, in particular to illustrate the transceiver budgets in Chapter 7.

3.1 Medium Access Strategies

By a “medium access strategy” we mean the strategy that is used by a wireless system in order to share in an optimal way the limited radio resource, i.e. the radio frequency band in practice, between on the one hand the different users and on the other hand the uplink and the downlink. ...