In DC/DC converters with low output voltage and high output current, the technique of synchronous rectification is widely used for improving the output efficiency. However, SR buck converters can experience the abnormal phenomenon called “self turn-on” which will occur in the low-side switch under some circuit conditions. “Self turn-on” is a malfunction of the low-side switch, basically caused by the resonance of the parasitic inductance and the parasitic capacitance. It results in noticeable power dissipation. In this paper, the phenomenon will be clearly described and investigated. With the theoretical analysis and the experimental verification, strategies that can suppress this phenomenon are proposed.

Topology of a network greatly affects the network performance. Depending on the purpose of a network, a specific topology may perform much better than any other topologies. Since the ad hoc networks are formed for a specific purpose, determining, and constructing the network topology based on the application requirements will enhance system performance. This paper proposes Bluetooth scatternet forming protocol in which the network topology is determined by three parameters. The parameters affecting the topology are the number of maximum slaves in a piconet, the number of maximum piconets that a gateway Bluetooth device can service, and the number of loops needed in the formed scatternet. These parameters can be read from a script file prior to the network formation. This process of reading the important parameters from the file would give users freedom in determining the network topology. The proposed protocol also includes a role negotiation process to accommodate different capabilities of the participating devices. The negotiation process of the protocol allows the resource-limited nodes to participate in the network. Different types of scatternet topologies like star, mesh, ring and line can be formed by specifying the parameters. This paper also discusses theoretical information necessary for calculating network topologies in detail. The protocol is verified with help of simulations, and implementations using commercially available Bluetooth devices. The detailed results are also presented in this paper.

Variance analysis is an important research topic to assess the quality of estimators. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the least ℓp-norm estimator in the presence of mixture of generalized Gaussian (MGG) noise. In the case of known density parameters, the variance expression of the ℓp-norm minimizer is first derived, for the general complex-valued signal model. Since the formula is a function of p, the optimal value of p corresponding to the minimum variance is then investigated. Simulation results show the correctness of our study and the near-optimality of the ℓp-norm minimizer compared with Cramér-Rao lower bound.

A joint estimator for carrier phase, symbol timing, and data sequence is proposed. This fully digital scheme is systematically derived from the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) theory. The simulation and the analytical results demonstrate that the scheme is asymptotical to the optimum in AWGN channel.

With the gradually increase of the application of new energy in microgrids, Electric Spring (ES), as a new type of distributed compensation power electronic device has been widely studied. The Generalized Electric Spring (G-ES) is an improved topology, and the space limitation problem in the traditional topology is solved. Because of the mode of G-ES use in the power grid, a reasonable solution to the voltage loss of the critical section feeder is needed. In this paper, the voltage balance equation based on the feedforward compensation coefficient is established, and a two cascade control strategy based on the equation is studied. The first stage of the two cascade control strategy is to use communication means to realize the allocation of feedforward compensation coefficients, and the second stage is to use the coefficients to realize feedforward fixed angle control. Simulation analysis shows that the proposed control strategy does not affect the control accuracy of the critical load (CL), and effectively improves the operational range of the G-ES.

The IEEE 802.11 protocol is one of the most important standards for Wireless Local Area Networks. The primary MAC protocol of 802.11 is the distributed coordination function (DCF), which is Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) with binary slotted exponential backoff scheme. The basic access and the RTS/CTS access mechanisms are the two channel access methods defined in DCF. In real work environments, the common channel access method of 802.11 is the coexistence of the above two mechanisms, i.e., packets longer than a given threshold RTSthreshold are transmitted according to the RTS/CTS mechanism, otherwise, they are transmitted by means of basic mechanism. The common mechanism is called as hybrid access mechanism in this paper. Few analytical models have been proposed to evaluate the hybrid access mechanism up to now. The necessary condition which enables the hybrid mechanism to work is that the packets must be variable. But, almost all analytical models proposed for 802.11 DCF assume that the packet size is fix, so they can not study the hybrid access method. In this paper, we propose a detailed analytical model to evaluate the saturation performance of the hybrid access mechanism, in the assumption that the packet lengthes are sampled from a general distribution function f(x). Both the throughput and the delay performances are concerned. Our model is validated by extensive simulations. By means of the proposed model, we compare the performances of the above three mechanisms, i.e., basic, RTS/CTS and hybrid, under different network scenarios. Numerical results show that the hybrid access mechanism is the best choice in almost all scenarios.

A new H.264 fast inter-mode decision algorithm based on coded block patterns is presented. Compared to the exhaustive mode search, the proposed method achieves an average 57 % reduction in computation time with negligible degradation in visual quality. The speed and rate-distortion performance is comparable to known fast algorithms that involve more elaborate mechanisms.

Many successful methods for recognizing human action are spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based methods. Given a test video sequence, for a matching-based method using a voting mechanism, each test STIP casts a vote for each action class based on its mutual information with respect to the respective class, which is measured in terms of class likelihood probability. Therefore, two issues should be addressed to improve the accuracy of action recognition. First, effective STIPs in the training set must be selected as references for accurately estimating probability. Second, discriminative STIPs in the test set must be selected for voting. This work uses ε-nearest neighbors as effective STIPs for estimating the class probability and uses a variance filter for selecting discriminative STIPs. Experimental results verify that the proposed method is more accurate than existing action recognition methods.

One of the disadvantages of compressed data is their vulnerability, that is, even a single corrupted bit in compressed data may destroy the decompressed data completely. Therefore, Variable-to-Fixed length Arithmetic Coding, or VFAC, with error detecting capability is discussed. However, implementable error recovery method for compressed data has never been proposed. This paper proposes Burst Error Recovery Variable-to-Fixed length Arithmetic Coding, or BERVFAC, as well as Error Detecting Variable-to-Fixed length Arithmetic Coding, or EDVFAC. Both VFAC schemes achieve VF coding by inserting the internal states of the decompressor into compressed data. The internal states consist of width and offset of the sub-interval corresponding to the decompressed symbol and are also used for error detection. Convolutional operations are applied to encoding and decoding in order to propagate errors and improve error control capability. The proposed EDVFAC and BERVFAC are evaluated by theoretical analysis and computer simulations. The simulation results show that more than 99.99% of errors can be detected by EDVFAC. For BERVFAC, over 99.95% of l-burst errors can be corrected for l 32 and greater than 99.99% of other errors can be detected. The simulation results also show that the time-overhead necessary to decode the BERVFAC is about 12% when 10% of the received words are erroneous.

In this paper, we propose a novel electronic bearer check system (EBC). This system allows the consumer to pay any amount of money below an upper-boundary on the Internet within an expiration period. During each transaction, the consumer does not need to contact the bank's server. Furthermore, this electronic bearer check can be transferred to any third party. The off-line characteristic of our system is very convenient for the consumer. Moreover, the double spending and double depositing problem will not occur in this system. More importantly, the framework of this system provides anonymity to protect customer privacy.

Dly-ACK scheme in IEEE 802.15.3 MAC is designed to reduce the overhead of the ACK frame in MAC layer and improve the channel utilization. However, how to using the Dly-ACK is open for implementation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive Dly-ACK scheme for both TCP and UDP traffic. We first point out the problems of applying fixed Dly-ACK scheme to these two traffic scenarios and show that the system performance is rather poor and the causes of these problems are presented. Based on our observations, two enhancement mechanisms for fixed Dly-ACK are then proposed. The first one is to request the Dly-ACK frame adaptively or change the burst size of Dly-ACK according to the transmitter queue status. The second is a retransmission counter to enable the destination DEV to deliver the MAC data frames to upper layer timely and orderly. Simulation results show that, with our enhancements, the system performance can be improved significantly compared with the conventional Imm-ACK and fixed Dly-ACK. We also investigate the impacts of some important parameters such as the buffer size on the system performance. Some important guidelines for the Dly-ACK design are given. Finally, it is worth to point out that our Dly-ACK enhancements are compatible with the standard and it is transparent to the upper layer protocols, i.e., either UDP or TCP.