Because large earthquakes have repeatedly occurred in subduction zones, it is important to observe seismic activities on the sea floor. An ocean bottom cabled seismometers (OBCS) system is the most suitable tool for this purpose since data can be obtained in real-time. Although the existing OBCS systems are useful for the study of seismic activities, the number of stations is limited due to their cost. Therefore, lower cost in both production and installation is desired. We have developed a new OBCS system utilizing IP technologies. IP technologies yield the new OBCS system that are more compact and less expensive, while a large amount of complex hardware is used in the existing OBCS system. System reliability is ensured by using IP network technologies that provide redundancy. The new OBCS system was first installed to observe the Niigata-Kobe tectonic zone in the Japan Sea on September 2010. Although this first OBCS system has a total length of 25 km, it has been proven that seismic data can be successfully obtained and that the new OBCS system is effective and useful for the dense observation of seismogenic activities on the sea floor around Japan.

Recent improvements in the performance of end-computers and networks have made it feasible to construct a grid system over the Internet. A grid environment consists of many computers, each having a set of components and a distinct performance. These computers are shared among many users and managed in a distributed manner. Thus, it is important to focus on a situation in which the computers are used unevenly due to decentralized management by different task schedulers. In this study, which is a preliminary investigation of the performance of task allocation schemes employed in a decentralized environment, the average execution time of a long-lived task is analytically derived using the M/G/1-PS queue. Furthermore, assuming a more realistic condition, we evaluate the performance of some task allocation schemes adopted in the analysis, and clarify which scheme is applicable to a realistic grid environment.

Subtrellises for low-weight codewords of binary linear block codes have been recently used in a number of trellis-based decoding algorithms to achieve near-optimum or suboptimum error performance with a significant reduction in decoding complexity. An algorithm for purging a full code trellis to obtain a low-weight subtrellis has been proposed by H.T. Moorthy et al. This algorithm is effective for codes of short to medium lengths, however for long codes, it becomes very time consuming. This paper investigates the structure and complexity of low-weight subtrellises for binary linear block codes. A construction method for these subtrellises is presented. The state and branch complexities of low-weight subtrellises for Reed-Muller codes and some extended BCH codes are given. In addition, a recursive algorithm for searching the most likely codeword in low-weight subtrellis-based decoding algorithm is proposed. This recursive algorithm is more efficient than the conventional Viterbi algorithm.

In IoT era, the growth of data variety is driven by cross-domain data fusion. In this paper, we advocate that “local production for local consumption (LPLC) paradigm” can be an innovative approach in cross-domain data fusion, and propose a new framework, geolocation-centric information platform (GCIP) that can produce and deliver diverse spatio-temporal content (STC). In the GCIP, (1) infrastructure-based geographic hierarchy edge network and (2) adhoc-based STC retention system are interplayed to provide both of geolocation-awareness and resiliency. Then, we discussed the concepts and the technical challenges of the GCIP. Finally, we implemented a proof-of-concepts of GCIP and demonstrated its efficacy through practical experiments on campus IPv6 network and simulation experiments.

In order to improve crop production and efficiency of farming operations, an IoT (Internet of Things) system for remote monitoring has been attracting a lot of attention. The existing studies have proposed agricultural sensing systems such that environmental information is collected from many sensor nodes installed in farmland through wireless communications (e.g., Wi-Fi, ZigBee). Especially, Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) is a focus as a candidate for wireless communication that enables the support of vast farmland for a long time. However, it is difficult to achieve long distance communication even when using the LPWA because a clear line of sight is difficult to keep due to many obstacles such as crops and agricultural machinery in the farmland. In addition, a sensor node cannot run permanently on batteries because the battery capacity is not infinite. On the other hand, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that can move freely and stably in the sky has been leveraged for agricultural sensor network systems. By utilizing a UAV as the gateway of the sensor network, the gateway can move to the appropriate location to ensure a clear line of sight from the sensor nodes. In addition, the coverage area of the sensor network can be expanded as the UAV travels over a wide area even when short-range and ultra-low-power wireless communication (e.g., Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)) is adopted. Furthermore, various wireless technologies (e.g., wireless power transfer, wireless positioning) that have the possibility to improve the coverage area and the lifetime of the sensor network have become available. Therefore, in this study, we propose and develop two kinds of new agricultural sensing systems utilizing a UAV and various wireless technologies. The objective of the proposed system is to provide the solution for achieving the wide-area and long-term sensing for the vast farmland. Depending on which problem is in a priority, the proposed system chooses one of two designs. The first design of the system attempts to achieve the wide-area sensing, and so it is based on the LPWA for wireless communication. In the system, to efficiently collect the environmental information, the UAV autonomously travels to search for the locations to maintain the good communication properties of the LPWA to the sensor nodes dispersed over a wide area of farmland. In addition, the second design attempts to achieve the long-term sensing, so it is based on BLE, a typical short-range and ultra-low-power wireless communication technology. In this design, the UAV autonomously flies to the location of sensor nodes and supplies power to them using a wireless power transfer technology for achieving a battery-less sensor node. Through experimental evaluations using a prototype system, it is confirmed that the combination of the UAV and various wireless technologies has the possibility to achieve a wide-area and long-term sensing system for monitoring vast farmland.

This paper describes 40-Gbit/s operation of 1.55-µm electro-absorption (EA) modulators applicable to compact and low-cost transmitters for very-short-reach (VSR) applications. We start by identifying factors that make a multi-quantum-well (MQW) design suitable for high levels of output power and for uncooled operation. From the basic experimental results, we determine that a valence-band discontinuity ΔEv at around 80 meV is optimal in terms of combining high-output-power operation and a good extinction ratio. We then apply the above findings in an InGaAsP-MQW EA modulator that is monolithically integrated with a distributed feedback (DFB) laser, and thus obtain operation with high output power (+1.2 dBm), a high ER (10.5 dB), and a low power penalty (0.4 dB after transmission over 2.6 km of single-mode-fiber). These results confirm the applicability of our EA modulator/DFB laser to VSR applications. After that, we theoretically demonstrate the superiority in terms of ER characteristics of the InGaAlAs-MQW over the conventional InGaAsP-MQW. InGaAlAs-MQW EA modulators are fabricated and demonstrate, for the first time, 40-Gbit/s operation over a wide temperature range (0 to 85).

Two types of low-coherence millimeter-wave sources for photonic millimeter-wave ellipsometry are compared. A broadband signal (125-GHz bandwidth) or a narrowband one (0.5-GHz bandwidth) is used to measure the complex relative dielectric constants of purified water, and the narrowband signal is revealed to be suitable for accurate measurement.

With the wide-spread use of high-speed network connections and high performance mobile/sensor terminals available, new interactive services based on real-time contents have become available over the Internet. In these services, end-nodes (e.g, smart phone, sensors), which are dispersed over the Internet, generates the real-time contents (e.g, live video, sensor data about human activity), and those contents are utilized to support many kinds of human activities seen in the real world. For the services, a new decentralized contents distribution system which can accommodate a large number of content distributions and which can minimize the end-to-end streaming delay between the content publisher and the subscribers is proposed. In order to satisfy the requirements, the proposed content distribution system is equipped with utilizing two distributed resource selection methods. The first method, distributed hash table (DHT)-based contents management, makes it possible for the system to efficiently decide and locate the server managing content distributions in completely decentralized manner. And, the second one, location-aware server selection, is utilized to quickly select the appropriate servers that distribute the streamed contents to all subscribers in real time. This paper considers the performance of the proposed resource selection methods using a realistic computer simulation and shows that the system with the proposed methods has scalability for a large-scale distributed system that attracts a very large number of users, and achieves real-time locating of the contents without degrading end-to-end streaming delay of content.

In this paper, we have proposed a new method of observing walking traces, which can observe people's indoor movement for life-logging. Particularly emphasized new techniques in this paper are methods to detect locations, where walking directions are changed, by analyzing azimuth orientations measured by an orientation sensor of an Android mobile device, and to decide walking traces by a map matching with a vector map. The experimental evaluation has shown that the proposed method can determine the correct paths of walking traces.

Measuring the duration of flow of a TCP connection in an end-to-end path is important in the management of network performance, and when this is done, an administrator can manage the quality of the networks using the α percentile of the distribution. We propose a method of estimating the distribution of flow duration in an end-to-end path through active measurement using a small degree of traffic. This method of estimation is based on traffic characteristics that are observed in measuring traffic in actual networks. It imposes little additional load on networks and the time in computation required to estimate the distribution is also short. The distribution to be estimated is assumed as a log-normal distribution, and the mean and variance of the distribution of a target file size is estimated by using results of active measurements. Means and variances in various file sizes are estimated through the linear relationships between these values (or their logarithms) and file size. We also provide numerical examples using actual traffic data.

An optical transport network is composed of optical transport systems deployed in thousands of office-buildings. As a common infrastructure to accommodate diversified communication services with drastic traffic growth, it is necessary not only to continuously convey the growing traffic but also to achieve high end-to-end communication quality and availability and provide flexible controllability in cooperation with service layer networks. To achieve high-speed and large-capacity transport systems cost-effectively, system configuration, applied devices, and the manufacturing process have recently begun to change, and the cause of failure or performance degradation has become more complex and diversified. The drastic traffic growth and pattern change of service networks increase the frequency and scale of transport-capacity increase and transport-network reconfiguration in cooperation with service networks. Therefore, drastic traffic growth affects both optical-transport-system configuration and its operational cycles. In this paper, we give an overview of the operational problems emerging in current nationwide optical transport networks, and based on trends analysis for system configuration and network-control schemes, we propose a vision of the future nationwide optical-transport-network architecture expressed using five target features.

This paper proposes fast repairing methods that uses hierarchical software defined network controllers for recovering from massive failure in a large-scale IP over a wavelength-division multiplexing network. The network consists of multiple domains, and slave controllers are deployed in each domain. While each slave controller configures transport paths in its domain, the master controller manages end-to-end paths, which are established across multiple domains. For fast repair of intra-domain paths by the slave controllers, we define the optimization problem of path configuration order and propose a heuristic method, which minimizes the repair time to move from a disrupted state to a suboptimal state. For fast repair of end-to-end path through multiple domains, we also propose a network abstraction method, which efficiently manages the entire network. Evaluation results suggest that fast repair within a few minutes can be achieved by applying the proposed methods to the repairing scenario, where multiple links and nodes fail, in a 10,000-node network.

This paper describes two promising millimeter-wave measurement techniques suitable for biological materials. One is reflection-geometry imaging using a low-coherence signal, and the other is millimeter-wave ellipsometry. Imaging porcine tissue during the desiccation process, we found the temporal variation of the reflection intensity to be well explained by an exponential decrease of the relative dielectric constant. Ellipsometry results showed that the complex relative dielectric constant also decreased exponentially with time during the desiccation process and that for bovine tissue the gradients for the real and imaginary parts of the constant were different. The implications of these results on the distribution of water in biological tissues are discussed.

To sustain and expand the agricultural economy even as its workforce shrinks, the efficiency of farm operations must be improved. One key to efficiency improvement is completely unmanned driving of farm machines, which requires stable monitoring and control of machines from remote sites, a safety system to ensure safe autonomous driving even without manual operations, and precise positioning in not only small farm fields but also wider areas. As possible solutions for those issues, we have developed technologies of wireless network quality prediction, an end-to-end overlay network, machine vision for safety and positioning, network cooperated vehicle control and autonomous tractor control and conducted experiments in actual field environments. Experimental results show that: 1) remote monitoring and control can be seamlessly continued even when connection between the tractor and the remote site needs to be switched across different wireless networks during autonomous driving; 2) the safety of the autonomous driving can automatically be ensured by detecting both the existence of people in front of the unmanned tractor and disturbance of network quality affecting remote monitoring operation; and 3) the unmanned tractor can continue precise autonomous driving even when precise positioning by satellite systems cannot be performed.

When a massive network disruption occurs, repair of the damaged network takes time, and the recovery process involves multiple stages. We propose a fast and flow-controlled multi-stage network recovery method for determining the pareto-optimal recovery order of failed physical components reflecting the balance requirement between maximizing the total amount of traffic on all logical paths, called total network flow, and providing adequate logical path flows. The pareto-optimal problem is formulated by mixed integer linear programming (MILP). A heuristic algorithm, called the grouped-stage recovery (GSR), is also introduced to solve the problem when the problem formulated by MILP is computationally intractable in a large-scale failure. The effectiveness of the proposed method was numerically evaluated. The results show that the pareto-optimal recovery order can be determined from the balance between total network flow and adequate logical path flows, the allocated minimum bandwidth of the logical path can be drastically improved while maximizing total network flow, and the proposed method with GSR is applicable to large-scale failures because a nearly optimal recovery order with less than 10% difference rate can be determined within practical computation time.

Recently, a trellis-based recursive maximum likelihood decoding (RMLD) algorithm has been proposed for decoding binary linear block codes. This RMLD algorithm is computationally more efficient than the Viterbi decoding algorithm. However, the computational complexity of the RMLD algorithm depends on the sectionalization of a code trellis. In general, minimization of the computational complexity results in non-uniform sectionalization of a code trellis. From implementation point of view, uniform sectionalization of a code trellis and regularity among the trellis sections are desirable. In this paper, we apply the RMLD algorithm to a class of codes which are transitive invariant. This class includes Reed-Muller (RM) codes, the extended and permuted BCH (EBCH) codes and their subcodes. For this class of codes, the binary uniform sectionalization of a code trellis results in the following regular structure. At each step of decoding recursion, the metric table construction procedure is applied uniformly to all the sections and the size and structure of each metric table are the same. This simplifies the implementation of the RMLD algorithm. Furthermore, for all RM codes of lengths 64 and 128 and EBCH codes of lengths 64 and 128 with relatively low rate, the computational complexity of the RMLD algorithm based on the binary uniform sectionalization of a code trellis is almost the same as that based on an optimum sectionalization of a code trellis.

We investigated growth conditions of the ReO3 thin films, as a first step of establishment of artificial superconducting multi-layer with the infinite layer cuprate and ReO3. The layers of ReO3 were expected to work as a charge reservoir block. The films were deposited from a Re metal target by off-axis reactive sputtering. Conductive and preferentially (100) oriented ReO3 thin films were obtained by in-situ post-annealing. The lowest resistivity was 4.4 10-5 ohmcm at room temperature.

In this paper, we have reported the development of a snowblower support system which can safely navigate snowblowers, even during a whiteout, with the combination of a very accurate GPS system, so called RTK-GPS, and a unique and highly accurate map of roadsides and obstacles on roads. Particularly emphasized new techniques in this paper are ways to detect accurate geographical positions of roadsides and obstacles by utilizing and analyzing 3D laser scanned data, whose data has become available in recent days. The experiment has shown that the map created by the methods and RTK-GPS can sufficiently navigate snowblowers, whereby a secure and pleasant social environment can be archived in snow areas of Japan. In addition, proposed methods are expected to be useful for other systems such as a quick development of a highly accurate road map, a safely navigation of a wheeled chair, and so on.

This paper describes the efficiency-limiting factors resulting from transistor current source in the case of class-F and inverse class-F (F-1) operations under saturated region. We investigated the influence of knee voltage and gate-voltage clipping behaviors on drain efficiency as limiting factors for the current source. Numerical analysis using a simplified transistor model was carried out. As a result, we have demonstrated that the limiting factor for class-F-1 operation is the gate-diode conduction rather than knee voltage. On the other hand, class-F PA is restricted by the knee voltage effects. Furthermore, nonlinear measurements carried out on a GaN HEMT validate our analytical results.

This paper proposes a recommendation-based bandwidth calendaring system for packet transport networks. The system provides a user-portal interface with which users can directly reserve packet transport resources. In this regard, the system recommends multi-grade (e.g., multi-price) reservation plans. By adjusting grades of plans in accordance with network resource utilization, this system provides not only reservation flexibility for users but also efficient utilization of network resources. For recommending multi-grade plans, pre-computation of resource allocation is required for every time slot. Because the number of time slots is huge, we also propose an algorithm for fast computation of resource allocation based on time-slot aggregation. Our evaluation suggests that our algorithm can produce a sub-optimal solution within quasi-real time for a large-scale network. We also show that our recommendation-based system can increase the service-provider-revenue in peaky traffic demand environments.