We investigated performance improvement in a cellular system by introducing direct communication between terminals. Previous research has indicated that direct communication efficiently uses channels; however, this is not always so. We studied two factors that affect how much efficiency improves. One is the distribution of terminals. We defined some typical distributions with localization of terminals and analyzed how the difference between the distributions affected the performance improvement by direct communication. Another factor is the mobility of terminals, because mobility shortens the length of time during which terminals are directly connected. We analyzed how mobility affected performance improvement by direct communication. For the analyses, we used some theoretical techniques.

Location theory on networks is concerned with the problem of selecting the best location in a specified network for facilities. In networks, the distance is an important measure to quantify how strongly related two vertices are. Mereover, the capacity between two vertices is also an important measure. In this paper, we define the location problems called the p-center problem, the r-cover problem and the p-median problem on undirected flow networks. We propose polynomial time algorithms to solve these problems.

The efficient use of frequency spectrum is one of the most important problems in mobile radio communication systems. In a small zone system (the so-called cellular system), the algorithm used to make the channel assignment for a call has a great effect on system performance (traffic characteristics). This paper presents the relationships between the traffic-carrying capacity and the graph which represents the relation among a zone and its buffer zones in the system. Furthermore, using these relationships, an algorithm for the dynamic frequency (channel) assignment which has all channel available at all base stations is proposed. The performance characteristics of this algorithm obtained from computer simulations are also presented. The computer simulation treats the two examples (systems), one is the system in which the mobile units does not cross a zone boundary during a communication (the zone size is sufficiently large and the probability of the occurrence can be neglected.), the other is the system in which the mobile unit may cross a zone boundary during a communication. The results from these simulations show that the algorithm carries more traffic per channel at a given blocking rate than the RING method.

To implement soft handoff in cellular communication systems that employ code division multiple access (CDMA), it is necessary to establish communication lines between the switch and multiple base stations and distribute the communication data via these multi-connections to the base stations simultaneously. This means that, when soft handoff is performed with the same amount of communication line resources as hard handoff, the blocking probability is higher than for hard handoff, and service quality is thus worse. Furthermore, handoffs occur more frequently as the size of cells becomes smaller, and this increases the probability of forced terminations. Switches must be endowed with greater processing capacity to accommodate the more frequent handoffs. The use of the queuing handoff method can be expected, in general, to mitigate forced termination probability compared with the immediate handoff method. In this regard, we propose a prioritized queuing handoff method that gives priority to fast-moving mobile stations (MSs) as a way to mitigate forced terminations even more than the non-priority queuing method without appreciably increasing the processing load. We then compare the traffic characteristics of our proposed method with these of three other methods in micro cell systems--immediate method, non-priority queuing method, and conventional hard handoff method without multi-connections--by computer simulation. Here, considering that the proposed method gives priority to fast-moving calls, traffic characteristics for these methods were evaluated separately for slow- and fast-moving MSs. The results reveal that proposed method can reduce the forced termination probability and total call failure probability more than non-priority queuing method without having an appreciable impact on slow-moving calls.

In multi-hop wireless networks, since source and destination nodes usually have some candidate paths between them, communication quality depends on the selection of a path from these candidates. For network design, characterizing the best path is important. To do this, in [1], [2] we used expected transmission count (ETX) as a metric of communication quality and showed that the best path for ETX is modeled by a path that consists of links whose lengths are close to each other in static one-dimensional multi-hop networks with a condition that the ETX function of a link is a convex monotonically increasing function. By using the results of this characterization, a minimum route ETX can be approximately computed in a one-dimensional random network. However, other metrics fail to satisfy the above condition, like medium time metric (MTM). In this paper, we use MTM as a metric of communication quality and show that we cannot directly apply the results of to the characterization of the best path for MTM and the computation of minimum route MTM. In this paper, we characterize the path that minimizes route MTM in a different manner from [1] [2] and propose a new approximate method suitable for the computation of minimum route MTM.

In general, dynamic channel assignment has a better performance than fixed channel assignment in a cellular mobile communication system. However, it is complex to control the system and a lot of equipments are required in each cell when dynamic channel assignment is applied to a large service area. Therefore, it is effective to limit the size of the service area in order to correct the defects of dynamic channel assignment. So, we propose an application of dynamic channel assignment to a part of a service area when fixed channel assignment is applied to the remaining part of the area. In the system, the efficiency of channel usage in some cells sometimes becomes terribly low. The system has such a problem to be improved. We show that the rearrangement of the channel allocation is effective on the problem.

Huynen has already provided a method to decompose a Mueller matrix in order to retrieve detailed target information in a polarimetric radar system. However, this decomposition sometimes fails in the presence of small error or noise in the elements of a Mueller matrix. This paper attempts to improve Huynen's decomposition method. First, we give the definition of stable decomposition and present an example, showing a problem of Huynen's approach. Then two methods are proposed to carry out stable decompositions, based on the nonlinear least square method and the Newton's method. Stability means the decomposition is not sensitive to noise. The proposed methods overcomes the problems on the unstable decomposition of Mueller matrix, and provides correct information of a target.

An FM-CW radar system for the detection of objects buried in sandy ground is explored and is applied to a field measurement. The key factors for underground FM-CW radar performance are the center frequency and bandwidth determining the depth at which the radar can detect targets and the resolution in the range direction. In order for FM-CW radar sounding, two ridged horn antennas are employed in the system, which are operative in the frequency range of 250-1000MHz. The impedance matching to the ground is optimized by measuring the echo strength from a fixed target as a function of the spacing interval between the antenna aperture and the ground surface. It is shown that the radar with an output power of 18dBm could detect a metallic plate (30100cm) and a pipe (10cmφ) buried at the depth of 1.2m. Also the synthetic aperture technique together with an averaging and subtracting method produced fine image in shallow region up to 100cm in the sandy ground.

In multi-hop wireless networks, communication quality depends on the route from a source to a destination. In this paper, we consider a one-dimensional multi-hop wireless network where nodes are distributed randomly and theoretically analyze the relation between communication quality and routing policy using a measure called the Expected Transmission Count (ETX), which is the predicted number of data transmissions required to send a packet over that link, including retransmissions. First, we theoretically analyze the mean length of links, the mean number of hops, and the mean route ETX, which is the sum of the ETXs of all links in a route, of Longest Path Routing (LPR), and Shortest Path Routing (SPR). Second, we propose Adjustable Routing (AR), an approximation to Optimum Routing (OR), which minimizes route ETX. We theoretically compute the above characteristic values of AR. We also theoretically compute a lower bound of the mean route ETX of OR. We compare LPR, SPR, and OR using the results of analyses and show differences between these algorithms in the route ETX.