This paper presents a Fault-Tolerant Object Group (FTOG) model that provides the group management service and the fault-tolerance service for consistency maintenance and state transparency. Through Intelligent Home Network Simulator, we verify that FTOG model supports both of reliability and the stability of the distributed system.

Atmospheric radio ducts can trap VHF/UHF radio waves and propagate them over long distances. 284.4625 MHz Japanese radio wave signal measurements show that the radio waves are propagated to Korea coastal regions when ground temperatures exceed 10C. This paper discusses the reasons for the existence of this critical temperature threshold.

The two-sample locally optimum rank detector test statistics for composite signals in additive, multiplicative, and signal-dependent noise are obtained in this letter. Compared with the structure of the one-sample locally optimum rank detector, that of the two-sample locally optimum rank detector is shown to be simpler, although it needs more computations. It is known that there is a trade-off of computational complexity and structural simplicity between the one- and two-sample detectors.

Recently, there has been extensive research on resource allocation schemes for multicast services that would satisfy the requirements of multimedia traffic. Although several schemes have been proposed to improve the performance of individual multicast groups, it is not easy to achieve both throughput efficiency and user fairness. In this study, we propose a new multicast scheduling scheme for achieving proportional fair (PF) allocation in wireless cellular systems. The basic idea of PF is to schedule the user whose corresponding instantaneous channel quality is the highest relative to the average channel condition over a given time scale. We first extend the PF metric to the extent that the scheduler can reflect the user's varying channel gain, and fairness, not only in the unicast case, but also in multicast transmissions. A multicast PF scheme maximizes the summation of the logarithmic average rate of all multicasting users. Thus, it improves the fairness to mobile users when compared to max-rate allocation, because the logarithmic rate gives more weight to lower rate users, while achieving high throughput. Moreover, the proposed scheme is less complex than max-rate allocation.

This letter investigates the effects of spatial correlation on several multiple antenna schemes in multiuser environments. Using an order statistics upper bound on achievable capacity, we quantify the interaction among spatial correlation, spatial diversity, spatial multiplexing and multiuser diversity. Also, it is verified that the upper bound is tighter than asymptotic capacity when the number of users is relatively small.

We propose a new call admission control (CAC) scheme for voice calls in cellular mobile communication networks. It is assumed that the rejection of a hand-off call is less desirable than that of a new call, for a hand-off call loss would cause a severe mental pain to a user. We consider the pains of rejecting new and hand-off calls as different costs. The key idea of our CAC is to restrict the admission of new calls in order to minimize the total expected costs per unit time over the long term. An optimal policy is derived from a semi-Markov decision process in which the intervals between successive decision epochs are exponentially distributed. Based on this optimal policy, we calculate the steady state probability for the number of established voice connections in a cell. We then evaluate the probability of blocking new calls and the probability of forced termination of hand-off calls. In the numerical experiments, it is found that the forced termination probability of hand-off calls is reduced significantly by our CAC scheme at the slight expense of the blocking probability of new calls and the channel utilization. Comparison with the static guard channel scheme is made.

Two main characteristics of VBR MPEG video traffic are the different statistics according to different picture types and the periodic traffic pattern due to GOP structure. Especially, the I-pictures at the beginning of each GOP generate much more traffic than other pictures. Therefore, when several VBR MPEG video sources are superposed, the multiplexing performance can vary according to the variations of their I-picture start times. In this paper, we show how the start time arrangement of the superposed VBR MPEG videos can significantly affect the cell loss ratio characteristics at the multiplexers, by using U-NDPP/D/1/B queueing model. It is also shown that the Lognormal distribution is more suitable for modeling VBR MPEG video traffic than the Normal and Gamma distributions, in the queueing application's view points.

The downlink beamforming weights which can suppress interfering signals toward out-of-cell mobile stations for a TDD-based OFDMA system are introduced. First, the downlink beamforming weights are optimally designed based on iteration. Then, the downlink beamforming weights are designed in a sub-optimal way. It is shown that the sub-optimally designed downlink beamforming weights have the same structure as that of the uplink beamforming weights which are derived based on MMSE. The performance of these schemes is compared based on the average receive SINR. The performance of a heuristic scheme which exploits uplink beamforming weights for downlink beamforming weights is also investigated.

In this paper there suggested is a bifurcated (or multiple) input-queued ATM switch in which a buffer for each input port is divided into multiple (m) buffer blocks, i. e. , bifurcated buffers, for enhancement of the limited throughput of the ordinary input-queued switch using a single FIFO. As the contention/arbitration rule for the bifurcated input-queued switching scheme, free and restricted contention rules are come up with and discussed. The free rule allows an input port to switch up to m cells at the cost of internal speedup. With the restricted rule, on the other hand, an input port can switch no more than one cell in a time slot so that the switch operates at the same speed as the external link speed. The throughput bound for the bifurcated input-queued switch is analyzed for both rules through the generalization of the analysis by Karol et al. The throughput bound approaches to 1.0 as m becomes large enough, irrespective of the contention/arbitration rule.

We consider power and rate adaptations in multicarrier (MC) direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) communications under the assumption that channel state information is provided at both the transmitter and the receiver. We propose, as a power allocation strategy in the frequency domain, to transmit each user's DS waveforms over the user's sub-band with the largest channel gain, rather than transmitting identical DS waveforms over all sub-bands. We then adopt channel inversion power adaptation in the time domain, where the target user's received power level maintains at a fixed value. We also investigate rate adaptation in the time domain, where the data rate is adapted such that a desired transmission quality is maintained. We analyze the BER performance of the proposed power and rate adaptations with fixed average transmission power, and show that power adaptation in both the frequency and the time domains or combined power adaptation in the frequency domain and rate adaptation in the time domain make significant performance improvement over the power adaptation in the frequency domain only. We also compare the performance of the proposed power and rate adaptation schemes in MC-DS/CDMA systems to that of power and rate adapted single carrier DS/CDMA systems with RAKE receiver.

In this paper, an improved B-picture coding algorithm based on the symmetric bi-directional motion estimation (ME) is proposed. In addition to the block match error between blocks in the forward and backward reference frames, the proposed method exploits the previously-reconstructed template regions in the current and reference frames for bi-directional ME. The side match error between the predicted target block and its template is also employed in order to alleviate block discontinuities. To efficiently perform ME, an initial motion vector (MV) is adaptively derived by exploiting temporal correlations. Experimental results show that the number of generated bits is reduced by up to 9.31% when the proposed algorithm is employed as a new macroblock (MB) coding mode for the H.264/AVC standard.

In this letter, the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) function for a special half-duplex dynamic decode and forward (DDF) relay protocol using two source-antennas, two destination-antennas, and more than two relay-antennas is derived. It is shown that the performance of the DDF relay protocol can be substantially improved by increasing the relay-antenna number, but only for low multiplexing gains.

We propose a normalization scheme of syntactic structures using a binary phrase structure grammar with composite labels. The normalization adopts binary rules so that the dependency between two sub-trees can be represented in the label of the tree. The label of a tree is composed of two attributes, each of which is extracted from each sub-tree, so that it can represent the compositional information of the tree. The composite label is generated from part-of-speech tags using an automatic labelling algorithm. Since the proposed normalization scheme is binary and uses only part-of-speech information, it can readily be used to compare the results of different syntactic analyses independently of their syntactic description and can be applied to other languages as well. It can also be used for syntactic analysis, which performs higher than the previous syntactic description for Korean corpus. We implement a tool that transforms a syntactic description into normalized one based on this proposed scheme. It can help construct a unified syntactic corpus and extract syntactic information from various types of syntactic corpus in a uniform way.

In order to minimize packet error rate in extremely dynamic vehicular networks, a novel vehicle to vehicle (V2V) mobile content transmission scheme that jointly employs random network coding and shuffling/scattering techniques is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme consists of 3 steps: Step 1-The original mobile content data consisting of several packets is encoded to generate encoded blocks using random network coding for efficient error recovery. Step 2-The encoded blocks are shuffled for averaging the error rate among the encoded blocks. Step 3-The shuffled blocks are scattered at different vehicle locations to overcome the estimation error of optimum transmission location. Applying the proposed scheme in vehicular networks can yield error free transmission with high efficiency. Our simulation results corroborate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the packet error rate performance in high mobility environments. Thanks to the flexibility of network coding, the proposed scheme can be designed as a separate module in the physical layer of various wireless access technologies.

IEEE 802.16m is an advanced air interface standard which is under development for IMT-Advanced systems, known as 4G systems. IEEE 802.16m is designed to provide a high data rate and a Quality of Service (QoS) level in order to meet user service requirements, and is especially suitable for mobilized environments. There are several factors that have great impact on such requirements. As one of the major factors, we mainly focus on latency issues. In IEEE 802.16m, an enhanced layer 2 handover scheme, described as Entry Before Break (EBB) was proposed and adopted to reduce handover latency. EBB provides significant handover interruption time reduction with respect to the legacy IEEE 802.16 handover scheme. Fast handovers for mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) was standardized by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in order to provide reduced handover interruption time from IP layer perspective. Since FMIPv6 utilizes link layer triggers to reduce handover latency, it is very critical to jointly design FMIPv6 with its underlying link layer protocol. However, FMIPv6 based on new handover scheme, EBB has not been proposed. In this paper, we propose an improved cross-layering design for FMIPv6 based on the IEEE 802.16m EBB handover. In comparison with the conventional FMIPv6 based on the legacy IEEE 802.16 network, the overall handover interruption time can be significantly reduced by employing the proposed design. Benefits of this improvement on latency reduction for mobile user applications are thoroughly investigated with both numerical analysis and simulation on various IP applications.

We present a numerical analysis of the optimal number of active mobile users for minimizing average data delivery delay in intelligent people-centric urban sensing, in which context-aware mobile devices act as sensor-data carriers and sensor nodes act as data accumulators within CDMA cellular networks. In the analysis, we compute the optimal number of mobile users for different environmental conditions and then investigate the minimum average data delivery delay for this optimal number of mobile users.

In this paper, we present an efficient architecture for connected word recognition that can be implemented with field programmable gate array (FPGA). The architecture consists of newly derived two-level dynamic programming (TLDP) that use only bit addition and shift operations. The advantages of this architecture are the spatial efficiency to accommodate more words with limited space and the absence of multiplications to increase computational speed by reducing propagation delays. The architecture is highly regular, consisting of identical and simple processing elements with only nearest-neighbor communication, and external communication occurs with the end processing elements. In order to verify the proposed architecture, we have also designed and implemented it, prototyping with Xilinx FPGAs running at 33 MHz.

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the prevalent reliable transport protocol used for many kinds of the popular Internet services like web browsing and e-mail. Because these services are the dominant applications on the Internet, TCP can be said to control the large majority of today's Internet traffic and we can say the enhancement of TCP performance means the improvement of the most Internet performance. This paper compares various ACK generation TCP strategies that play very important roles in TCP operation and proposes advanced delayed ACK algorithms to mitigate the negative effect of delayed ACK algorithm. Even if delayed ACK has the bright side to save network resources and power consumption that are the very important factors especially for mobile and wireless environment, it has also dark side not to take full advantage of network bandwidth in Slow Start phase. It is reported that delayed ACK timeout of the first and last segment causes severe degradation problem in TCP throughput performance. We suggest new algorithms to solve delayed ACK penalty and to guarantee fairness with other traffics in Slow Start. In wired-cum-wireless network environments,'BADA (Base station Aided Delayed ACK)' with SNDA (Sender Notification Delayed ACK), the combination of our proposed algorithm shows the best performance in terms of throughput as well as in terms of network resource sharing. Our simulation shows significantly improved performance in TCP throughput.

This paper proposes an efficient adaptive depth-map coding scheme for generating virtual-view images in 3D-video. Virtual-view images can be generated by view-interpolation based on the decoded depth-map of the image. The proposed depth-map coding scheme is designed to have a new gray-coding-based bit-plane coding method for efficiently coding the depth-map images on the object-boundary areas, as well as the conventional DCT-based coding scheme (H.264/AVC) for efficiently coding the inside area images of the objects or the background depth-map images. Simulation results show that the proposed coding scheme, in comparison with the H.264/AVC coding scheme, improves the BD-rate savings 6.77%-10.28% and the BD-PSNR gains 0.42 dB-0.68 dB. It also improves the subjective picture quality of synthesized virtual-view images using decoded depth-maps.

The impact and benefits of channel state information (CSI) are analyzed in terms of degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) in a K-user interference network operating over time-selective channels, where the error variance of CSI estimation is assumed to scale with an exponent of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The original interference alignment (IA) scheme is used with a slight modification in the network. Then, it is shown that the DoFs promised by the original IA can be fully achieved under the condition that the CSI quality order, represented as a function of the error variance and the SNR, is greater than or equal to 1. Our result is extended to the case where the number of communication pairs, K, scales with the SNR, i.e., infinite K scenario, by introducing the user scaling order. As a result, this letter provides vital information to the system designer in terms of allocating training resources for channel estimation in practical cellular environments using IA.