Time performance optimization and resource conflict resolution are two important challenges in multiple project management contexts. Compared with traditional project management, multi-project management usually suffers limited and insufficient resources, and a tight and urgent deadline to finish all concurrent projects. In this case, time performance optimization of the global project management is badly needed. To our best knowledge, existing work seldom pays attention to the formal modeling and analyzing of multi-project management in an effort to eliminate resource conflicts and optimizing the project execution time. This work proposes such a method based on PRT-Net, which is a Petri net-based formulism tailored for a kind of project constrained by resource and time. The detailed modeling approaches based on PRT-Net are first presented. Then, resource conflict detection method with corresponding algorithm is proposed. Next, the priority criteria including a key-activity priority strategy and a waiting-short priority strategy are presented to resolve resource conflicts. Finally, we show how to construct a conflict-free PRT-Net by designing resource conflict resolution controllers. By experiments, we prove that our proposed priority strategy can ensure the execution time of global multiple projects much shorter than those without using any strategies.

A K-user parallel concatenated code (PCC) is proposed for a Gaussian multiple-access channel with symbol synchronization, equal-power, and equal-rate users. In this code, each user employs a PCC with M+1 component codes, where the first component code is a rate-1/q repetition code and the other M component codes are the same rate-1 recursive convolutional (RC) codes. By designing the repetition coding rate and the RC component code, the K-user PCC achieve reliable transmission for a given number of users and noise level. Two decoding schemes are considered: low-density parity-check (LDPC)-like decoding and Turbo-like decoding. For each decoding scheme, a fixed point analysis is given to optimize the parameters: the rate of repetition component code 1/q, the number of RC component codes M, or the RC component codes themselves. The analysis shows that an accumulate code is the optimal RC component code for a K-user PCC, in the sense of achieving the maximum sum rate. The K-user PCC with an accumulate component code achieves a larger sum rate in the high rate region than the conventional scheme of an error correction code serially concatenated with spreading under similar encoding and decoding complexity.

Conventional adaptive array antenna processing must access signals on all of the array antenna elements. However, because the low-cost electronically steerable passive array radiator (ESPAR) antenna only has a single-port output, all of the signals on the antenna elements cannot be observed. In this paper, a technique for adaptively controlling the loaded reactances on the passive radiators, thus forming both beam and nulls, is presented for the ESPAR antenna. The adaptive algorithm is based on the steepest gradient theory, where the reactances are sequentially perturbed to determine the gradient vector. Simulations show that the ESPAR antenna can be adaptive. The statistical performance of the output SIR of the ESPAR antenna is also given.

The electronically steerable passive array radiator (ESPAR) antenna is one kind of the parasitic elements based single-port output antennas with several variable reactances. It performs analog aerial beamforming and none of the signals on its passive elements can be observed. This fact and one that is more important--the nonlinear dependence of the output of the antenna from adjustable reactances--makes the problem substantially new and not resolvable by means of conventional adaptive array beamforming techniques. A novel approach based on stochastic approximation theory is proposed for the adaptive beamforming of the ESPAR antenna as a nonlinear spatial filter by variable parameters, thus forming both beam and nulls. Two learning rate schedule were examined about output SINR, stability, convergence, misadjustment, noise effect, bias term, etc., and the optimal one was proposed. Further development was traced. Our theoretic study, simulation results and performance analysis show that the ESPAR antenna can be controlled effectively, has strong potential for use in mobile terminals and seems to be very perspective.

In the user identification (UI) scheme for a multiple-access fading channel based on a randomly generated (0, 1, -1)-signature code, previous studies used the signature code over a noisy multiple-access adder channel, and only the user state information (USI) was decoded by the signature decoder. However, by considering the communication model as a compressed sensing process, it is possible to estimate the channel coefficients while identifying users. In this study, to improve the efficiency of the decoding process, we propose an iterative deep neural network (DNN)-based decoder. Simulation results show that for the randomly generated (0, 1, -1)-signature code, the proposed DNN-based decoder requires less computing time than the classical signal recovery algorithm used in compressed sensing while achieving higher UI and channel estimation (CE) accuracies.

With the fast growth of the international tourism industry, it has been a challenge to forecast the tourism demand in the international tourism market. Traditional forecasting methods usually suffer from the prediction accuracy problem due to the high volatility, irregular movements and non-stationarity of the tourist time series. In this study, a novel single dendritic neuron model (SDNM) is proposed to perform the tourism demand forecasting. First, we use a phase space reconstruction to analyze the characteristics of the tourism and reconstruct the time series into proper phase space points. Then, the maximum Lyapunov exponent is employed to identify the chaotic properties of time series which is used to determine the limit of prediction. Finally, we use SDNM to make a short-term prediction. Experimental results of the forecasting of the monthly foreign tourist arrivals to Japan indicate that the proposed SDNM is more efficient and accurate than other neural networks including the multi-layered perceptron, the neuro-fuzzy inference system, the Elman network, and the single multiplicative neuron model.

A K-user interleave-division multiple-access (IDMA) system with symbol-synchronous and equal-power users is considered. In this IDMA system, the spreading, interleaving, and multiple-access channel (MAC) are jointly considered as an equivalent channel, referred to as an IDMA channel. Given channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the sum capacity of the IDMA channel is only determined by a K-user spread-interleave (SI) matrix. First, it is shown that to maximize the sum capacity of the IDMA channel, rows or columns of its K-user SI matrix should be pairwise orthogonal. The optimal K-user SI matrix is constructed. Second, for the IDMA system with each user employing the same spreading sequence followed by random interleaving, it is shown that, as the number of users approaches infinity, the sum capacity of the IDMA channel converges to a determinate value, which is achieved by a balanced spreading sequence. Moreover, when both the number of users and the data length approach infinity, this determinate value of sum capacity is achieved by an arbitrary spreading sequence. Furthermore, for a finite number of users, an optimal spreading sequence is derived by minimizing an expected column correlation of the K-user SI matrix. It shows that this optimal spreading sequence provides the maximum ergodic sum capacity.

In this paper, the Voronoi region of the transmitted codeword is employed to improve the sphere bound on the maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD) performance of binary linear block codes over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. We obtain the improved sphere bounds both on the frame-error probability and the bit-error probability. With the framework of the sphere bound proposed by Kasami et al., we derive the conditional decoding error probability on the spheres by defining a subset of the Voronoi region of the transmitted codeword, since the Voronoi regions of a binary linear block code govern the decoding error probability analysis over AWGN channels. The proposed bound improves the sphere bound by Kasami et al. and the sphere bound by Herzberg and Poltyrev. The computational complexity of the proposed bound is similar to that of the sphere bound by Kasami et al.

Recent years have seen increasing efforts to improve the input/output performance of multilevel flash memory. In this regard, we propose a coding scheme for two-page unrestricted-rate parallel random input-output (P-RIO) code, which enables different code rates to be used for each page of multilevel memory. On the second page, the set of cell-state vectors for each message consists of two complementary vectors with length n. There are a total of 2n-1 sets that are disjoint to guarantee that they are uniquely decodable for 2n-1 messages. On the first page, the set of cell-state vectors for each message consists of all weight-u vectors with their non-zero elements restricted to the same (2u-1) positions, where the non-negative integer u is less than or equal to half of the code length. Finding cell-state vector sets such that they are disjoint on the first page is equivalent to the construction of constant-weight codes, and the number of disjoint sets is the best-known number of code words in the constant-weight codes. Our coding scheme is constructive, and the code length is arbitrary. The sum rates of our proposed codes are higher than those of previous work.

The electronically steerable passive array radiator (ESPAR) antenna performs analog aerial beamforming that has only a single-port output and none of the signals on its passive elements can be observed. This fact and one that is more important--the highly nonlinear dependence of the output of the antenna from adjustable reactances--makes the problem substantially new and not resolvable by means of conventional adaptive array beamforming techniques. A novel approach based on stochastic approximation theory is proposed for the adaptive beamforming of the ESPAR antenna as a nonlinear spatial filter by variable parameters, thus forming both beam and nulls. Our theoretic study, simulation results and performance analysis show that the ESPAR antenna can be controlled effectively, has strong potential for use in mobile terminals and seems to be very perspective.

In this paper network coding based relay for multi-access channel is studied. In the system, two nodes send messages to a common access point (AP). A relay assists the two nodes by forwarding a network coded version of the messages. The AP performs joint channel and network decoding to recover the two original messages from three received signals. Two schemes, soft network coding (SoftNC) and turbo network coding (TurboNC), both focusing on bitwise exclusive or (XOR) based network coding, are proposed to salvage messages from erroneous signals. SoftNC is simple and backward compatible with existing protocol stack of wireless networks, and reduces packet errors by maximal ratio combining (MRC). TurboNC improves channel efficiency by letting the relay node transmit only parity check bits of the interleaved XORed message, where reliability is retained by iterative decoding. Simulation results show that compared with the network-layer path diversity scheme, both SoftNC and TurboNC greatly improve the reliability, and TurboNC also achieves a much higher throughput. The proposed schemes are suitable for improving the performance of wireless local area networks (WLAN).

Coding scheme for a noisy multiple-access adder channel is proposed. When a T-user δ-decodable affine code C is given a priori, a qT-user λ δ-decodable affine code C* is produced by using a q q matrix B satisfying BA=λ Iq q, e. g. , a Hadamard matrix or a conference matrix. In particular, the case of δ=1 is considered for the practical purposes. A (2n-1)-user uniquely decodable (δ=1) affine code Cn with arbitrary code length n is recursively constructed. When Cn plays a role of C, a q(2n-1)-user λ-decodable affine code C* is obtained. The code length and the number of users of C* are more flexible than those of the Wilson's code. The total rate of the λ-decodable code in this paper tends to be higher than that of the λ-decodable code by Wilson as the number of users increases.

A direction-of-arrival estimation (DoA) scheme that uses a uniform circular array (UCA) is proposed for near-field sources, where multiple pairs-of-subarrays exist with central symmetry. First, multiple generalized ESPRIT (G-ESPRIT) spectrums are obtained by applying the conventional G-ESPRIT algorithm to each of multiple pairs-of-subarrays. Second, a parallel spectrum is found by adding up the reciprocals of these G-ESPRIT spectrums and taking the reciprocal of the total. The locations of peaks in the parallel spectrum give the DoAs being estimated. When a DoA approaches the translation direction of two subarrays, the conventional G-ESPRIT spectrum is broken by a false peak. Since the translation directions of pairs-of-subarrays are different from each other, the false peak, due to the DoA approaching one of translation directions, does not exist simultaneously in all G-ESPRIT spectrums. The parallel concatenation of the spectrums suppresses the false peak and enhances the true DoA peaks. Simulation shows that the proposed scheme reduces the root mean square error of the DoA estimation, compared with the conventional G-ESPRIT algorithm.

Physical-layer network coding with binary turbo coding in a two-way relay channel is considered. A two-user turbo decoding scheme is proposed with a simplified sum trellis. For two-user iterative decoding at a relay, the component decoder with its simplified sum trellis decodes the superimposed signal to the arithmetic sum of two users' messages. The simplified sum trellis is obtained by removing one of the states in a pair of mutual symmetrical states from a sum trellis. This removal reduces the decoding complexity to half of that with the sum trellis, and does not degrade decoding performance over AWGN channel since two output sequences from the pair of mutual symmetrical states are the same.

In this study, we consider fake message attacks in sparse mobile ad hoc networks, in which nodes are chronically isolated. In these networks, messages are delivered to their destination nodes using store-carry-forward routing, where they are relayed by some nodes. Therefore, when a node has messages in its buffer, it can falsify the messages easily. When malicious nodes exist in the network, they alter messages to create fake messages, and then they launch fake message attacks, that is, the fake messages are spread over the network. To analyze the negative effects of a fake message attack, we model the system dynamics without attack countermeasures using a Markov chain, and then formalize some performance metrics (i.e., the delivery probability, mean delivery delay, and mean number of forwarded messages). This analysis is useful for designing countermeasures. Moreover, we consider a hash-based countermeasure against fake message attacks using a hash of the message. Whenever a node that has a message and its hash encounters another node, it probabilistically forwards only one of them to the encountered node. By doing this, the message and the hash value can be delivered to the destination node via different relay nodes. Therefore, even if the destination node receives a fake message, it can verify the legitimacy of the received message. Through simulation experiments, we evaluate the effectiveness of the hash-based countermeasure.

Multi-user uniquely decodable (UD) k-ary coding for the multiple-access adder channel is investigated. It is shown that a Tf+g+1-user UD k-ary affine code with code length f+g+1 can be obtained from two Tf-user and Tg-user UD k-ary affine codes. This leads to construct recursively a Tn-user UD k-ary affine code with arbitrary code length n. The total rate of the code tends to be higher than those of all the multi-user UD k-ary codes reported previously as the number of users increases.

A recursive construction of (k+1)-ary error-correcting signature code is proposed to identify users for MAAC, even in the presence of channel noise. The recursion is originally from a trivial signature code. In the (j-1)-th recursion, from a signature code with minimum distance of 2j-2, a longer and larger signature code with minimum distance of 2j-1 is obtained. The decoding procedure of signature code is given, which consists of error correction and user identification.

A T-user uniquely decodable (UD) code {C1,C2,,CT} over an integer set {0,1,,k} with arbitrary code length is developed for a multiple-access adder channel (MAAC). Each of the T users is equipped with two codewords, one of which is zero vector. The T-user UD code is used to identify users through the MAAC. It is shown that a T(f+g+1)-user UD code with code length f+g+1 can be arranged from two given T(f)-user and T(g)-user UD codes. This idea makes it possible to construct recursively a T-user UD code for an arbitrary code length n and a positive integer k. The T-user UD code includes the Jevticode.

Software watermarking is a digital technique used to protect software by embedding some secret information as identification in order to discourage software piracy and unauthorized modification. Watermarking is still a relatively new field and has good potential in protecting software from privacy threats. However, there appears to be a security vulnerability in the watermark trigger behaviour, and has been frequently attacked. By tracing the watermark trigger behaviour, attackers can easily intrude into the software and locate and expose the watermark for modification. In order to address this problem, we propose an algorithm that obscures the watermark trigger behaviour by utilizing buffer overflow. The code of the watermark trigger behaviour is removed from the software product itself, making it more difficult for attackers to trace the software. Experiments show that the new algorithm has promising performance in terms of the imperceptibility of software watermark.

This paper concerned the research on a memristive chaotic system and the generated random sequence; by constructing a piecewise-linear memristor model, a kind of chaotic system is constructed, and corresponding numerical simulation and dynamical analysis are carried out to show the dynamics of the new memristive chaotic system. Finally the proposed memristive chaotic system is used to generate random sequence for the possible application in encryption field.