This paper proposes a likelihood estimation method for reduced-complexity maximum-likelihood (ML) detectors in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) spatial-multiplexing (SM) system. Reduced-complexity ML detectors, e.g., Sphere Decoder (SD) and QR decomposition (QRD)-M algorithm, are very promising as MIMO detectors because they can estimate the ML or a quasi-ML symbol with very low computational complexity. However, they may lose likelihood information about signal vectors having the opposite bit to the hard decision and bit error rate performance of the reduced-complexity ML detectors are inferior to that of the ML detector when soft-decision decoding is employed. This paper proposes a simple estimation method of the lost likelihood information suitable for the reduced-complexity ML detectors. The proposed likelihood estimation method is applicable to any reduced-complexity ML detectors and produces accurate soft-decision bits. Computer simulation confirms that the proposed method provides excellent decoding performance, keeping the advantage of low computational cost of the reduced-complexity ML detectors.

In order to improve the antenna gain, a composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave (LW) antenna composed of symmetrical unit cells with short stubs terminated by vertical vias is designed. The use of symmetrical unit cells suppresses the cross-polarization of radiation to less than 23 dB. By comparing the measured radiation characteristics to that of a conventional CRLH LW antenna without short stub in the X-band, it is shown that the presented CRLH LW antenna with 51 unit cells offers a narrower beam and the antenna gain improves 4.1, 2.2 and 3.1 dB in the backward, broadside and forward directions of radiation, respectively.

Optical couplers which are composed of three channel waveguides arranged two-dimensionally are investigated numerically. The mode-matching method that matches the boundary conditions in the sense of least squares is applied to this problem, using the hybrid-modal representation. The precise numerical results of the dispersion relations and field distributions are presented for the lowest three modes near the cutoff. The arrangement of three waveguides can be optimized so as to satisfy the condition for maximum power-transfer efficiency.

Segmentation of a dielectric resonator enables one to control its spurious property. When a dielectric plate is divided into some planar pieces, the effective permittivity does not change appreciably along the divided plane, while it decreases quite an amount perpendicular to it. This anisotropy is useful for shifting the resonant frequencies of unwanted modes of a dielectric resonator. Since its eigen modes have their own electric field distribution, segmentation of a resonator along the electric line of force of a certain mode will not affect its resonant frequency. When the type of segmentation is changed, we can select the wanted mode, and thus control the resonant frequencies of the unwanted modes. Calculated results with an EM field simulator and experimental results of controlling the resonant frequency are shown for divided dielectric resonators.

This paper focuses on a multi-beam combining scheme for DS-CDMA systems, which has RAKE combiners in multiple overlapped beams, in order to increase the reverse link capacity of DS-CDMA. This scheme is a very attractive technique because the maximal ratio combining (MRC) is carried out in space and time domains. However, in a practical situation, since the terminals in own sector are not uniformly located, the interference levels in respective beams are different. Therefore, receivers at the base station do not achieve ideal combining. This paper proposes a multi-beam combining scheme for DS-CDMA systems using weighting factor based on interference level of each beam. A fast closed loop transmission power control (TPC) scheme for the multi-beam combining system is also proposed. It is confirmed by computer simulation that the proposed scheme has excellent performance in the reverse link even if terminals in own sector are not uniformly located.

A new structure of a waveguide-type left-handed transmission line is proposed. It is composed of two rectangular waveguides with many stubs. One waveguide is put on another waveguide symmetrically. When one mode with odd electric field distribution is excited, the stubs work as open stubs and the mode propagates with very small loss. Guided regions of the left-handed mode and a right-handed mode are discussed using an approximate equivalent circuit. Tuning the structure parameters, the band gap between the two regions can be removed, and the wave propagates continuously from the left-handed frequency regions to the right-handed frequency region. The transmission line is applied to a leaky waveguide. It is confirmed experimentally that the beam angle of the radiation wave changes from the backward to the forward directions.

A left-handed material with simple structure is proposed. The material is composed of periodic metal strips exhibiting both electric property and magnetic property. The dispersion relations and the transmission characteristics are confirmed experimentally. The main field pattern of guided mode in the material is similar to that of the plane wave, and a transmission characteristic with low reflection is obtained for an impedance matching region.

A particle for artificial magnetic materials in microwave frequency is proposed. It has simple structure composed of two parallel metal strips and is suitable to make a thin material extending in the transverse plane. In order to grasp the characteristic the effective permeability is formulated in the form of a transmission line. The characteristics of effective permeability are discussed based on the transmission line model for miniaturization and increase of the permeability. After discussing the reflection from materials with negative permeability or negative permittivity, a high impedance material is constituted. Total reflection with zero phase from the material composed of modified magnetic particles is measured in a waveguide.

This paper presents a novel approach to a soft-output equalizer, which makes a symbol-by-symbol soft-decision based on a posteriori probabilities (APP's) criterion in the presence of intersymbol interference. The authors propose a soft-output Viterbi equalizer (SOVE) employing expanded memory length in a trellis of the Viterbi algorithm with small arithmetic complexity. The proposed equalizer gives suboptimum soft-decision closer to that of a equalizer with the maximum a posteriori probabilities (MAP) algorithm than the conventional SOVE.

Cooperative diversity using space-time codes offers effective space diversity with low complexity, but the scheme needs the space-time coding process in the relay nodes. We propose a simple cooperative relay scheme that uses space-time coding. In the scheme, the source node transmits the Alamouti coded signal sequences and the sink node receives the signal sequence via the two coordinated relay nodes. At the relay nodes, the operation procedure is just permutation and forwarding of the signal sequence. In the proposed scheme, none of the relay nodes need quadrature detection and space-time coding and the simple relay process offers effective space diversity. Moreover, simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed relay process by some simulations.

The left-handed (LH) operation of a three-dimensional (3-D) LH material composed of wired metallic spheres is experimentally confirmed. A 15153-cell periodic structure designed to have an isotropic LH characteristics is fabricated by a 3-D printer with post plating technology, and near-field measurements of refracted waves by the negative refractive index slab lens are carried out. The dispersion characteristics measured from the near-field distributions on the surface of the LH material clearly show that the structure supports the backward waves at 12 GHz band. It is also shown experimentally that the resolution of the slab lens exceeds the diffraction limit by near field measurements with a single source and adjacent two sources. In addition, near-field measurements from the LH material near the Γ-point frequency at 12.90 GHz are carried out. A highly directive plane wave with a single point source is observed and the near-zero-index operation has been confirmed.

This paper proposes a new antenna array calibration technique which uses frequency selection in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)/time division duplexing (TDD) systems. In the proposed method, subbands or frequencies of good channel conditions are initially selected for channel measurements. The relative calibration is performed at the selected subbands, which compensates for mismatch of analogue gains in multiple antennas using the measured uplink and downlink channel parameters. Furthermore, the calibration parameters are interpolated in the frequency domain for the whole bandwidth. The proposed calibration maintains accurate channel reciprocity for the whole bandwidth compared to the conventional calibration which does not use the frequency selection. The proposed calibration technique is effective in exploiting channel reciprocity at both base station and terminals with feasible amount of feedback and low-cost operation.

Unloaded Q of a dielectric image resonator is discussed based on the electromagnetic field distribution. It is shown that a partial air gap and a dielectric sheet with low permittivity between the dielectric resonator and the shield case reduce both the dielectric loss and the conductor loss. Especially, reduction of the conductor loss is significant, since the magnetic field distribution moves from the conductor to the upper part of resonator. A half-cut image resonator with an air gap and dielectric spacer is simulated and measured. The unloaded Q of the dielectric resonator with low dielectric loss is improved by about two times from that of original image resonator.

A miniaturized rectangular resonator made of a novel anisotropic artificial dielectric material is investigated which has advantages of small size and big separation of the higher-modes. To obtain a property of anisotropic permittivity, artificial dielectric material is fabricated by lamination of rectangular metal strips etched on a printed circuit board. Artificial dielectric rectangular resonators are designed to excite TE10δ mode selectively, aligning the rectangular metal patterns along the direction of the mode electric field line. The resonant frequencies and coupling coefficient of artificial dielectric rectangular resonators encapsulated in a metal waveguide are analyzed theoretically, and compared with the experimental result. As a microwave application, a high selectivity TE10δ mode bandpass filter (BPF) using two artificial dielectric rectangular resonators is demonstrated. A two-stage BPF with the center frequency of 1.718 GHz, bandwidth of 78 MHz, and insertion loss of 1.3 dB is successfully realized in a rectangular waveguide.

A two-dimensional negative refractive index material is proposed. The material has a bulky structure composed of dielectric prism cells with metal patterns. The material is expressed by an equivalent circuit. The propagation regions of two left-handed modes calculated from the equivalent circuit exist near the propagation regions obtained by electromagnetic simulation. It is confirmed by simulation that the incident plane wave goes into the material with low reflection by using the second left-handed mode and attaching metal conversion strips around the material. A negative refractive index slab lens with 15×9 cells is made to measure the field distribution of wave out of the lens. It is shown that the resolution of the slab lens exceeds the diffraction-limit.

Cylindrical dielectric waveguide with a periodically varying radius are investigated numerically. The mode-matching method that matches the boundary conditions in the sense of least squares in applied to this problem, using the hybrid-modal representation. The accurate numerical results of the dispersion relations and field distribution are presented for the HE11 mode. It is shown that the attenuation rate in the stopband is significantly smaller than that of TE01 mode, whereas the HE11 mode suffers an additional power leakage due to the coupling with EH11 and HE12 modes of radiation region.

This paper proposes non-coherent multiple-input multi-ple-output (MIMO) communication systems employing per transmit antenna differential mapping (PADM), which generates an independent differentially encoded sequence for each of the multiple transmit antennas by means of space-time coding and mapping. At a receiver, the proposed PADM employs adaptive maximum-likelihood detection (MLD). The features of PADM are as follows: 1) it has excellent tracking performance for fast time-varying fading channels, because it can detect transmitted data without needing channel state information (CSI); 2) it can be applied not only to transmit diversity (TD) but also to spatial multiplexing (SM). In this paper, we analyze the adaptive MLD based on pseudo matrix inversion and derive its metric for data detection. In order to satisfy requirements on multiple transmitted sequences for the adaptive MLD, this paper proposes a mapping rule for PADM. Next, this paper describes a receiver structure based on per-survivor processing (PSP), which can drastically reduce the complexity of adaptive MLD. Finally, computer simulations confirm that the proposed non-coherent MIMO communication systems employing PADM have excellent tracking capability for TD and SM on fast time-varying fading channels.

A compact, nonradiative, and easy fabricated left-handed material composed of planar circuit-type resonators in a cutoff waveguide is proposed. It is shown that the TE-type evanescent field is equivalent to the field in ε-negative material and the resonator works as a particle with negative permeability. The existence of a left-handed mode is ensured by a field distribution and a dispersion relation. After showing that the two constituents have an influence on the permittivity or the permeability of the material, on the basis of an idea of impedance, the material is matched to a conventional waveguide. Finally the material can be applied to a left-handed leaky-wave antenna.

This paper proposes a co-channel interference cancellation method for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems. Maximum-likelihood multi-user detection (ML-MUD), which is one of the co-channel interference cancellation methods at a receiver side, has excellent bit error rate (BER) performance. However, computational complexity of the ML-MUD is prohibitive, because the ML-MUD must search for the most probable symbol vector from all candidates of the transmitted signals. We apply sphere decoding (SD) to the ML-MUD in order to reduce the computational complexity of the ML-MUD, and moreover we propose a modified version of the SD suitable for the ML-MUD. The proposed method extracts desired signal components from a received signal vector and a channel matrix decomposed the upper triangular form, and then performs the SD to the low dimensional model in order to detect the transmitted signals of the desired user. Computer simulation confirms that the proposed method can suppress the undesired signals and detect the desired signals, offering significant reduction of the computational complexity of the conventional method.

To improve the quality of wireless communication, transmit/receive diversity techniques in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system have been investigated vigorously. In this paper, we consider an asymmetric MIMO orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system, in which the number of transmit antennas is larger than that of receive antennas. In this system, there is a need to achieve the high quality of communication in both low and high mobility scenarios by a single transmit diversity scheme. Recently, as for the advanced diversity schemes based on space time block coding (STBC)/space frequency block coding (SFBC), STBC/STBC-phase shift diversity (PSD) and SFBC-frequency switched transmit diversity (FSTD) have been proposed. However, in these schemes, it is possible that time diversity gain can not be sufficiently obtained especially in the low mobility scenario. Therefore, in this paper, the joint use of grouped phase rotation in time/frequency domain and STBC (GPR-STBC) is proposed to get the larger channel coding gains than other schemes. In this paper, we evaluate the average bit error rate (BER) performance by computer simulation in a comparison with the conventional transmit diversity schemes and discuss the relationship from the viewpoints of BER performance and computational complexity.