To study the molten bridge phenomenon of contacts at the initial breaking process, an experimental device of molten bridge between slowly opening contacts was developed. The system consists of the contact moving control module, the circuit load and the observation module. The molten bridge of copper contact under two load conditions 9,V/19,A and 9,V/7.3,A were studied. The voltage and current characteristics curves of Cu molten bridge were extracted and the resistance and the instantaneous power of the molten bridge were analyzed. The image of the Cu molten bridge diameter was captured by CCD under 9,V/19,A and the influences of the contact force and the separation speed on the molten bridge length and the crater diameter of the anode were studied. The root profile of the Cu contacts after separation was analyzed by digital microscope. Research results show that the Cu molten bridge length has the same changing trend as the diameter of the anode crater. They both decrease with the increment of the separation speed and the decrement of the contact force.

We propose an accurate, distributed localization method that uses the connectivity measure to localize nodes in a wireless sensor network. The proposed method is based on a self-organizing isometric embedding algorithm that adaptively emphasizes the most accurate range of measurements and naturally accounts for communication constraints within the sensor network. Each node adaptively chooses a neighborhood of sensors and updates its estimate of position by minimizing a local cost function and then passes this update to the neighboring sensors. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed method is more robust to measurement error than previous methods and it can achieve comparable results using much fewer anchor nodes than previous methods.

The multi-step prediction model based on partial least squares (PLS) is established to predict short-term load series with high embedding dimension in this paper, which refrains from cumulative error with local single-step linear model, and can cope with the multi-collinearity in the reconstructed phase space. In the model, PLS is used to model the dynamic evolution between the phase points and the corresponding future points. With research on the PLS theory, the model algorithm is put forward. Finally, the actual load series are used to test this model, and the results show that the model plays well in chaotic time series prediction, even if the embedding dimension is selected a big value.

Infrared and visible image fusion can combine the thermal radiation information and the textures to provide a high-quality fused image. In this letter, we propose a hybrid variational fusion model to achieve this end. Specifically, an ℓ0 term is adopted to preserve the highlighted targets with salient gradient variation in the infrared image, an ℓ1 term is used to suppress the noise in the fused image and an ℓ2 term is employed to keep the textures of the visible image. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed variational model and our results have more sharpen textures with less noise.

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation as a fundamental issue in array signal processing has been extensively studied for many applications in military and civilian fields. Many DOA estimation algorithms have been developed for different application scenarios such as low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), limited snapshots, etc. However, there are still some practical problems that make DOA estimation very difficult. One of them is the correlation between sources. In this paper, we develop a sparsity-based method to estimate the DOA of coherent signals with sparse linear array (SLA). We adopt the off-grid signal model and solve the DOA estimation problem in the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework. By considering the SLA as a ‘missing sensor’ ULA, our proposed method treats the output of the SLA as a partial output of the corresponding virtual uniform linear array (ULA) to make full use of the expanded aperture character of the SLA. Then we employ the expectation-maximization (EM) method to update the hyper-parameters and the output of the virtual ULA in an iterative manner. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method has a better performance in correlated signal scenarios than the reference methods in comparison, confirming the advantage of exploiting the extended aperture feature of the SLA.

Routing algorithms with low overhead, stable link and independence of the total number of nodes in the network are essential for the design and operation of the large-scale wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). In this paper, we develop and analyze the Cluster Based Location-Aided Routing Protocol for MANET (C-LAR), a scalable and effective routing algorithm for MANET. C-LAR runs on top of an adaptive cluster cover of the MANET, which can be created and maintained using, for instance, the weight-based distributed algorithm. This algorithm takes into consideration the node degree, mobility, relative distance, battery power and link stability of mobile nodes. The hierarchical structure stabilizes the end-to-end communication paths and improves the networks' scalability such that the routing overhead does not become tremendous in large scale MANET. The clusterheads form a connected virtual backbone in the network, determine the network's topology and stability, and provide an efficient approach to minimizing the flooding traffic during route discovery and speeding up this process as well. Furthermore, it is fascinating and important to investigate how to control the total number of nodes participating in a routing establishment process so as to improve the network layer performance of MANET. C-LAR is to use geographical location information provided by Global Position System to assist routing. The location information of destination node is used to predict a smaller rectangle, isosceles triangle, or circle request zone, which is selected according to the relative location of the source and the destination, that covers the estimated region in which the destination may be located. Thus, instead of searching the route in the entire network blindly, C-LAR confines the route searching space into a much smaller estimated range. Simulation results have shown that C-LAR outperforms other protocols significantly in route set up time, routing overhead, mean delay and packet collision, and simultaneously maintains low average end-to-end delay, high success delivery ratio, low control overhead, as well as low route discovery frequency.

This paper presents an advanced quad-band multi-chip power amplifier module with unique linear output power dependency to the control voltage. It was developed for GSM850/900 MHz and DCS1800/PCS1900 MHz handset applications. The module was made on 10 mm by 10 mm substrate, which combined an InGaP HBT GSM, and DCS power amplifier ICs, two integrated couplers, a dual-band logarithmic RF power detector and some additional passive components. The logarithmic RF power detector was implemented in the module using state-of-the-art Si technology to accomplish the linear power dependency. With the logarithmic RF power detector approach we achieved more than 50 dB linear output power control range. The output power in dBm is a linear function of a control voltage; therefore there is no need for the Original Equipment Manufacture to design a power control circuitry. This is a very desirable feature to many handset designers who want to significantly reduce the handset board size, design cost, and time-to-market. The approach allows the handset manufacturer to calibrate the output power at two points with error of less than 0.3 dB, thus significantly reducing test time in mass production. Under a low single supply voltage of 3.2 V the module provides 35 dBm output power, 55% PAE in GSM900 band and 33 dBm, 50% PAE in DCS1800 band.

The hidden terminal problem leads to frequent collisions and decreases the throughput of ad hoc networks dramatically. Low network spatial reuse also results in fewer parallel transmissions, which further leads to reduced network throughput. Eliminating the hidden terminals and improving the spatial reuse are two important approaches to improving network throughput. In this paper, spatial distribution of the hidden terminals is analyzed in consideration of accumulated interference and environmental noise. As the distribution of hidden terminals is affected by many factors such as transmitter-receiver distance, SINR requirement and nodes density, it is inefficient to use fixed busy tone transmission power. To eliminate the hidden terminals and improve network spatial reuse, an enhancement to DBTMA named EDBTMA is proposed. This is achieved by using an adaptive busy tone power control scheme. Receivers adjust the transmission power of busy tone according to received signal power and accumulated interference adaptively so that all hidden terminals (and only hidden terminals) are covered by the busy tone. Simulation results show that EDBTMA protocol can solve the hidden terminal problem and improve network spatial reuse better than DBTMA and achieves 65% additional network throughput compared to DBTMA.

This letter proposes a busy-tone based scheme for reliable and efficient broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks. Control packets such as RTS, CTS and ACK are ignored in the broadcast scheme, and two busy tones are used, one for channel reservation and the other for negative acknowledgement. Unlike traditional schemes for reliable broadcasting, the proposed scheme is highly efficient as it achieves both collision avoidance and fast packet loss recovery. Simulation results are presented which show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In this paper, we propose a new scheme which uses blind detection algorithm for recovering the conventional user signal in a system which the sporadic machine-to-machine (M2M) communication share the same spectrum with the conventional user. Compressive sensing techniques are used to estimate the M2M devices signals. Based on the Hopfield neural network (HNN), the blind detection algorithm is used to recover the conventional user signal. The simulation results show that the conventional user signal can be effectively restored under an unknown channel. Compared with the existing methods, such as using the training sequence to estimate the channel in advance, the blind detection algorithm used in this paper with no need for identifying the channel, and can directly detect the transmitted signal blindly.