Mobile devices are severely power and area limited due to battery capacity and system size. In many of these example systems, advanced features require computationally complex signal processing on high-speed data streams for enhanced networking capabilities. Thus, mapping high-level communication and networking algorithms to system architectures is a complex and challenging procedure. An important challenge is to characterize the area, time, and power requirements of these embedded system modules and to use this information effectively to determine the architecture of programmable, reconfigurable, and fixed-function modules. In this paper, we will focus on application examples in wireless networking which highlight these challenges in reconfigurable systems integration.