An exact expression of error rate is developed for maximal ratio combining (MRC) in an independent but not necessarily identically distributed frequency selective Nakagami fading channel taking into account inter-symbol, co-channel and adjacent channel interferences (ISI, CCI and ACI respectively). The characteristic function (CF) method is adopted. While accurate analysis of MRC performance cannot be seen in frequency selective channel taking ISI (and CCI) into account, such analysis for ACI has not been addressed yet. The general analysis presented in this paper solves a problem of past and present interest, which has so far been studied either approximately or in simulations. The exact method presented also lets us obtain an approximate error rate expression based on Gaussian approximation (GA) of the interferences. It is shown, especially while the channel is lightly faded, has fewer multipath components and a decaying delay profile, the GA may be substantially inaccurate at high signal-to-noise ratio. However, the exact results also reveal an important finding that there is a range of parameters where the simpler GA is reasonably accurate and hence, we don't have to go for more involved exact expression.

In this paper, we propose an Estimation of Signal Parameter via Rotational Invariance Techniques (ESPRIT) based algorithm for estimating the two-dimensional-direction-of-arrivals (2D-DOA) of signals impinging on a uniform rectangular array (URA). The basic idea of the proposed algorithm is to successively apply two rounds of one-dimensional ESPRIT (1D-ESPRIT) algorithm for 2D-DOA estimation. The first round 1D-ESPRIT is applied on columns of the URA whereas the other round 1D-ESPRIT is on the rows of the URA. In between, a grouping technique is developed to produces signal groups each containing signals with distinguishable spatial signatures. The grouping technique is performed by using the subspace projection method where the needed spatial information is provided by the first round 1D-ESPRIT algorithm. Computer simulations show that, in addition to having significantly reduced computational complexity, the proposed algorithm possesses better estimation accuracy as compared to the conventional 2D-ESPRIT algorithm.

This paper proposes two space-time joint channel parameter estimation and signal detection algorithms for downlink DS-CDMA systems with multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wireless multipath fading channels. The proposed algorithms initially use the space-time MUSIC to estimate the DOA-delays of the multipath channel. Based on these estimated DOA-delays, a space-time channel decoupler is developed to decompose the multipath downlink channel into a set of independent parallel subchannels. The fading amplitudes of the multipath can then be estimated from the eigen space of the output of the space-time channel decoupler. With these estimated channel parameters, signal detection is carried out by a maximal ratio combiner on a pathwise basis. Computer simulations show that the proposed algorithms outperform the conventional space-time RAKE receiver while having the similar performance compared with the space-time minimum mean square error receiver.

This paper presents a wavelet-based approach for the design of the finite impulse response (FIR) notch filter with controlled null width. The M-band P-regular wavelet filters are employed to constitute the null space of the derivative constraint matrix. Taking advantage of the vanishing moment property of the wavelet filters, the proposed method controls the null width of the notch filter by adjusting the regularity of the employed wavelet filters. Besides, the selection of large number of bands of the wavelet filters can effectively reduce the minimum mean square error and thus improve the performance of the notch filter. Computer simulations show that, in addition to possessing lower computational complexity, the proposed reduced-rank method has similar frequency response compared to those of the full-rank-based techniques.

A blind joint parametric channel estimation and non-coherent data detection algorithm is proposed for the downlink of an orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing code-division-multiple-access (OFDM-CDMA) system with multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna arrays. To reduce the computational complexity, we first develop a tree-structured algorithm to estimate high dimensional parameters predominantly describing the involved multipath channels by employing several stages of low dimensional parameter estimation algorithms. In the tree structure, to exploit the space-time distribution of the receive multipath signals, spatial beamformers and spectral filters are adopted for clustered-multipath grouping and path isolation. In conjunction with the multiple access interference (MAI) suppression techniques, the proposed tree architecture algorithm jointly estimates the direction of arrivals, propagation delays, carrier frequency offsets and fading amplitudes of the downlink wireless channels in a MIMO OFDM-CDMA system. With the outputs of the tree architecture, the signals of interest can then be naturally detected with a path-wise maximum ratio combining scheme.

This paper presents a step-up/step-down DC-DC converter using a digital dither technique to achieve high efficiency and small output voltage ripple for portable electronic devices. The proposed control method minimizes not only the switching loss by operating like a pure buck or boost converter, but also the conduction loss by reducing the average inductor current even when four switches are used. Digital dither control is introduced to implement a buffer region for smooth transition between buck and boost modes. A minimum ripple dither with higher fundamental frequency is adopted to decrease the output voltage ripple. A window delay-line analog to digital converter (ADC) with delay calibration is achieved to digitalize the control voltage. The step-up/step-down DC-DC converter has been designed with a standard 0.5 µm CMOS process. The output voltage is regulated within the input voltage ranged from 2.5 V to 5.5 V, and the output voltage ripple is reduced to less than 25 mV during the mode transition. The peak power efficiency is 96%, and the maximum load current can reach 800 mA.

This letter presents an image quality assessment (IQA) metric for scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images based on texture inpainting. Inspired by the observation that the texture information of SEM images is quite sensitive to distortions, a texture inpainting network is first trained to extract texture features. Then the weights of the trained texture inpainting network are transferred to the IQA network to help it learn an effective texture representation of the distorted image. Finally, supervised fine-tuning is conducted on the IQA network to predict the image quality score. Experimental results on the SEM image quality dataset demonstrate the advantages of the presented method.

Searching mechanisms employed in unstructured overlay networks typically hit multiple peers for the desired content. We propose the use of a simple method that raises the hit rates of unpopular contents and balances the loads by choosing the peer holding the least contents as the provider when multiple candidates exist.

It's a trend to consider the power supply integrity at early stage to improve the design quality. Specifically, floorplanning process is modified to improve the power supply as well. In the modified floorplanning process, both the floorplan and power/ground (P/G) network are adjusted to search for optimal floorplan as well as the most robust power supply. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to carry out this modified floorplanning. A new analytical method is proposed to estimate the voltage drop while the floorplan is varying constantly. This fast analytical voltage drop estimating method is plugged into the modified floorplanner to speed up the whole floorplanning process. Compared with previous methods, our algorithm can search for the optimal floorplan with consideration of power supply integrity more efficiently and therefore leads to better results. Furthermore, this paper also proposes a novel heuristic method to optimize the topology of P/G network. This optimization algorithm could construct a more robust power supply system. Experimental results show the method can speedup the IR-drop aware floorplanning process by about 10 times and reduce the routing area of P/G network while maintaining the floorplan quality and power supply integrity.

This letter describes two low complexity receiver structures over a multi-broadcast channel of an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) multi-user system. The first is a one-group occupied receiver structure, whose complexity is much lower than that of a conventional OFDMA receiver structure. The other one, a multi-group occupied receiver structure, exploits multiple groups for one user, by which users' down-link data rate can be adaptively controlled by a base station (BS). Unlike unchangeable complexity of an OFDMA receiver structure that performs full-size of a fast Fourier transform (FFT) operation although only a few subcarriers are taken, its complexity linearly increases with the number of occupied subcarrier groups. The proposed receiver structures can meet the possible high-rate demand in the down-link and will become one of the strong candidates in next generation mobile communication systems.

Yield-driven clock skew scheduling was previously formulated as a minimum cost-to-time ratio cycle problem, by assuming that variational path delays are in Gaussian distributions. However in today's nanometer technology, process variations show growing impacts on this assumption, as variational delays with non-Gaussian distributions have been observed on these paths. In this paper, we propose a novel yield-driven clock skew scheduling method for arbitrary distributions of critical path delays. Firstly, a general problem formulation is proposed. By integrating the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of critical path delays, the formulation is able to handle path delays with any distributions. It also generalizes the previous formulations on yield-driven clock skew scheduling and indicates their statistical interpretations. Generalized Howard algorithm is derived for finding the critical cycles of the underlying timing constraint graphs. Moreover, an effective algorithm based on minimum balancing is proposed for the overall yield improvement. Experimental results on ISCAS89 benchmarks show that, compared with two representative existing methods, our method remarkably improves the yield by 10.25% on average (up to 14.66%).

In many radio frequency identification (RFID) applications, the reader identifies the tags in its scope repeatedly. For these applications, many algorithms, such as an adaptive binary splitting algorithm (ABS), a single resolution blocking ABS (SRB), a pair resolution blocking ABS (PRB) and a dynamic blocking ABS (DBA) have been proposed. All these algorithms require the staying tags to reply with their IDs to be recognized by the reader. However, the IDs of the staying tags are stored in the reader in the last identification round. The reader can verify the existence of these tags when identifying them. Thus, we propose an anti-collision algorithm with short reply for RFID tag identification (ACSR). In ACSR, each staying tag emits a short reply to indicate its continued existence. Therefore, the data amount transmitted by staying tags is reduced significantly. The identification rate of ACSR is analyzed in this paper. Finally, simulation and analysis results show that ACSR greatly outperforms ABS, SRB and DBA in terms of the identification rate and average amount of data transmitted by a tag.

The low complexity tree-structure based user scheduling algorithm is extended into up-link MLD-based multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) wireless systems. The system sum capacity is maximized by careful user selection on a defined tree structure. The calculation load is reduced by selecting the M most possible best branches and sampling in frequency dimension. The performances of the proposed scheduling algorithm are analyzed within three kinds of OFDMA systems and compared with conventional throughput-based algorithm. Both the theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm obtains better performance with much low complexity.

In P2P content distribution systems, there are many cases in which the content can be classified into hierarchically organized categories. In this paper, we propose a hybrid overlay network design suitable for such content called Pastry/NSHCC (Pastry for Non-Strictly Hierarchically Categorized Content). The semantic information of classification hierarchies of the content can be utilized regardless of whether they are in a strict tree structure or not. By doing so, the search scope can be restrained to any granularity, and the number of query messages also decreases while maintaining keyword searching availability. Through simulation, we showed that the proposed method provides better performance and lower overhead than unstructured overlays exploiting the same semantic information.

Radio Frequency based Device-Free Localization (RFDFL) is an emerging localization technique without requirements of attaching any electronic device to a target. The target can be localized by means of measuring the shadowing of received signal strength caused by the target. However, the accuracy of RFDFL deteriorates seriously in environment with WiFi interference. State-of-the-art methods do not efficiently solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a dual-band method to improve the accuracy of RFDFL in environment without/with severe WiFi interference. We introduce an algorithm of fusing dual-band images in order to obtain an enhanced image inferring more precise location and propose a timestamp-based synchronization method to associate the dual-band images to ensure their one-one correspondence. With real-world experiments, we show that our method outperforms traditional single-band localization methods and improves the localization accuracy by up to 40.4% in real indoor environment with high WiFi interference.

In this study, we propose a one dimensional (1D) based successive generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) structure for the implementation of 2D adaptive beamformers using a uniform rectangular antenna array (URA). The proposed approach takes advantage of the URA feature that the 2D spatial signature of the receive signal can be decomposed into an outer product of two 1D spatial signatures. The 1D spatial signatures lie in the column and the row spaces of the receive signal matrix, respectively. It follows that the interferers can be successively eliminated by two rounds of 1D-based GSC structure. As compared to the conventional 2D-GSC structure, computer simulations show that in addition to having significantly low computational complexity, the proposed adaptive approach possesses higher convergence rate.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is very sensitive to the frequency errors caused by phase noise and Doppler shift. These errors will disturb the orthogonality among subcarriers and cause intercarrier interference (ICI). A simple method to combat ICI is proposed in this letter. The main idea is to map each data symbol onto a couple of subcarriers rather to a single subcarrier. Different from the conventional adjacent coupling and symmetric coupling methods, the frequency diversity can be utilized more efficiently by the proposed adaptive coupling method based on optimal subcarrier spacing. Numerical results show that our proposed method provides a robust signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement over the conventional coupling methods.

User Generated Content (UGC) VoD services such as YouTube are becoming more and more popular, and their maintenance costs are growing as well. Many P2P solutions have been proposed to reduce server load in such systems, but almost all of them focus on the single-video approach, which only has limited effect on the systems serving short videos such as UGC. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential of an alternative approach, the multi-video approach, and we use a very simple method called collaborative caching to show that methods using the multi-video approach are generally more suitable for current UGC VoD systems. We also study the influence of the major design factors through simulations and provide guidelines for efficiently building systems with this method.

Coupled with the discrete wavelet transform, SPIHT (set partitioning in hierarchical trees) is a highly efficient image compression technique that allows for progressive transmission. One problem, however, is that its decoding can be extremely sensitive to bit errors in the code sequence. In this paper, we address the issue of transmitting SPIHT-encoded images via noisy channels, wherein errors are inevitable. The communication scenario assumed in this paper is that the transmitter cannot get any acknowledgement from the receiver. In our scheme, the original SPIHT code sequence is first segmented into packets. Each packet is classified as either a CP (critical packet) or an RP (refinement packet). For error control, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is incorporated into each packet. By checking the CRC check sum, the receiver is able to tell whether a packet is correctly received or not. In this way, the noisy channel can be effectively modeled as an erasure channel. For unequal error protection (UEP), each of those packets are repeatedly transmitted for a few times, as determined by a process called diversity allocation (DA). Two DA algorithms are proposed. The first algorithm produces a nearly optimal decoded image (as measured in the expected signal-to-noise ratio). However, its computation cost is extremely high. The second algorithm works in a progressive fashion and is naturally compatible with progressive transmission. Its computation complexity is extremely low. Nonetheless, its decoded image is nearly as good. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the decoded images. They also show that making distinction between CP and RP results in wiser diversity allocation to packets and thus produces higher quality in the decoded images.

In this paper, we present a new approach for the design of partially adaptive broadband beamformers with the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) as an underlying structure. The approach designs the blocking matrix involved by utilizing a set of P-regular, M-band wavelet filters, whose vanishing moment property is shown to meet the requirement of a blocking matrix in the GSC structure. Furthermore, basing on the subband decomposition property of these wavelet filters, we introduce a new dynamic subband selection scheme succeeding the blocking matrix. The scheme only retains the principal subband components of the blocking matrix outputs based on a prescribed statistical hypothesis test and thus further reduces the dimension of weights in adaptive processing. As such, the overall computational complexity, which is mainly dictated by the dimension of adaptive weights, is substantially reduced. The furnished simulations show that this new approach offers comparable performance as the existing fully adaptive beamformers but with reduced computations.