This paper is primarily concerned with the performance of Medium Access Control (MAC) layer plans for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in the context of buffer management solutions. We propose a novel buffer management solution that improves the general performance of MAC layer plans, in particular those crafted for WSNs. An analytical model is introduced in order to evaluate the cost of different buffer management solutions. The proposed buffer management solution, Single Queue Multi Priority (SQMP), is compared with well-known Single Queue Single Priority (SQSP) and Multi Queue Multi Priority (MQMP) buffer management solutions. All buffer management solutions are investigated in terms of throughput performance, utilization of the buffer and prioritization capabilities. Despite the relatively good performance of the different buffer management solutions in uncongested networks, the characteristic features of WSNs cause a degradation in the performance. In bursty conditions, SQMP controls and manages this degradation more effectively in comparison with the other two solutions. Simulations based on Omnet++ and Castalia confirm the performance improvements of our buffer management solution.

Given a graph G=(V,E) where V and E are a vertex and an edge set, respectively, specified with a subset VNT of vertices called a non-terminal set, the spanning tree with non-terminal set VNT is a connected and acyclic spanning subgraph of G that contains all the vertices of V where each vertex in a non-terminal set is not a leaf. The complexity of finding a spanning tree with non-terminal set VNT on general graphs where each edge has the weight of one is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we show that if G is an interval graph then finding a spanning tree with a non-terminal set VNT of G is linearly-solvable when each edge has the weight of one.

High energy cost is a big challenge faced by the current data centers, wherein computing energy and cooling energy are main contributors to such cost. Consolidating workload onto fewer servers decreases the computing energy. However, it may result in thermal hotspots which typically consume greater cooling energy. Thus the tradeoff between computing energy decreasing and cooling energy decreasing is necessary for energy saving. In this paper, we propose a minimized-total-energy virtual machine (VM for short) migration model called C2vmMap based on efficient tradeoff between computing and cooling energies, with respect to two relationships: one for between the resource utilization and computing power and the other for among the resource utilization, the inlet and outlet temperatures of servers, and the cooling power. Regarding online resolution of the above model for better scalability, we propose a VM migration algorithm called C2vmMap_heur to decrease the total energy of a data center at run-time. We evaluate C2vmMap_heur under various workload scenarios. The real server experimental results show that C2vmMap_heur reduces up to 40.43% energy compared with the non-migration load balance algorithm. This algorithm saves up to 3x energy compared with the existing VM migration algorithm.

Visual object detection on embedded systems involves a multi-objective optimization problem in the presence of trade-offs between power consumption, processing performance, and detection accuracy. For a new Pareto solution with high processing performance and low power consumption, this paper proposes a hardware architecture for decision tree ensemble using multiple channels of features. For efficient detection, the proposed architecture utilizes the dimensionality of feature channels in addition to parallelism in image space and adopts task scheduling to attain random memory access without conflict. Evaluation results show that an FPGA implementation of the proposed architecture with an aggregated channel features pedestrian detector can process 229 million samples per second at 100MHz operation frequency while it requires a relatively small amount of resources. Consequently, the proposed architecture achieves 350fps processing performance for 1080P Full HD images and outperforms conventional object detection hardware architectures developed for embedded systems.

Precession angle and precession period are significant parameters for identifying space micro-motion targets. To implement high-accuracy estimation of precession parameters without any prior knowledge about structure parameters of the target, a parameters extraction method based on HRRP sequences is proposed. The precession model of cone-shaped targets is established and analyzed firstly. Then the projection position of scattering centers on HRRP induced by precession is indicated to be approximate sinusoidal migration. Sequences of scattering centers are associated by sinusoid extraction algorithm. Precession angle and precession period are estimated utilizing error function optimization at last. Simulation results under various SNR levels based on electromagnetic calculation data demonstrate validity of the proposed method.

In this letter, we study the resource allocation for the downlink cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems based on the amplifying-and-forward protocol relay transmission. A joint power allocation and amplification gain selection scheme are proposed. Fractional programming and the iterative algorithm based on the Lagrangian multiplier are used to allocate the transmit power to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the systems. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve higher energy efficiency compared with the minimum power transmission (MPT-NOMA) scheme and the conventional OMA scheme.

This letter addresses the problem of space-time adaptive processing (STAP) for airborne nonuniform linear array (NLA) radar using a generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC). Due to the difficulty of determining the spatial nulls for the NLAs, it is a problem to obtain a valid blocking matrix (BM) of the GSC directly. In order to solve this problem and improve the STAP performance, a BM modification method based on the modified Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization algorithm is proposed. The modified GSC processor can achieve the optimal STAP performance and as well a faster convergence rate than the orthogonal subspace projection method. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

We consider space time block coded-continuous phase modulation (STBC-CPM), which has the advantages of both STBC and CPM at the same time. A weak point of STBC-CPM is that the normalized spectral efficiency (NSE) is limited by the orthogonality of the STBC and CPM parameters. The purpose of this study is to improve the NSE of STBC-CPM. The NSE depends on the transmission rate (TR), the bit error rate (BER) and the occupied bandwidth (OBW). First, to improve the TR, we adapt quasi orthogonal-STBC (QO-STBC) for four transmit antennas and quasi-group orthogonal Toeplitz code (Q-GOTC) for eight transmit antennas, at the expense of the orthogonality. Second, to evaluate the BER, we derive a BER approximation of STBC-CPM with non-orthogonal STBC (NO-STBC). The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the NSE can be improved by using QO-STBC and Q-GOTC. Third, the OBW depends on CPM parameters, therefore, the tradeoff between the NSE and the CPM parameters is considered. A computer simulation provides a candidate set of CPM parameters which have better NSE. Finally, the adaptation of non-orthogonal STBC to STBC-CPM can be viewed as a generalization of the study by Silvester et al., because orthogonal STBC can be thought of as a special case of non-orthogonal STBC. Also, the adaptation of Q-GOTC to CPM can be viewed as a generalization of our previous letter, because linear modulation scheme can be thought of as a special case of non-linear modulation.

The main purpose of Codemark is to distribute digital contents using offline media. Due to the main purpose of Codemark, Codemark cannot be used on digital images. It has high robustness on only printed images. This paper presents a new color code called Robust Index Code (RIC for short), which has high robustness on JPEG Compression and Resize targeting digital images. RIC embeds a remote database index to digital images so that users can reach to any digital contents. Experimental results, using our implemented RIC encoder and decoder, have shown high robustness on JPEG Comp. and Resize of the proposed codemark. The embedded database indexes can be extracted 100% on compressed images to 30%. In conclusion, it is able to store all the type of digital products by embedding indexes into digital images to access database, which means it makes a Superdistribution system with digital images realized. Therefore RIC has the potential for new Internet image services, since all the images encoded by RIC are possible to access original products anywhere.

MICKEY-family ciphers are lightweight cryptographic primitives and include a register R determined by two related maximal-period linear transformations. Provided that primitivity is efficiently decided in finite fields, it is shown by quantitative analysis that potential parameters for R can be found in probabilistic polynomial time.

This paper addresses joint estimation of the frequency and the direction-of-arrival (DOA), under the relaxed condition that both snapshots in the temporal domain and sensors in the spacial domain are sparsely spaced. Specifically, a novel coprime sparse array allowing a large range for interelement spacings is employed in the proposed joint scheme, which greatly alleviates the conventional array's half-wavelength constraint. Further, by incorporating small-sized DFT spectrum correction with the closed-form robust Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT), both spectral aliasing and integer phase ambiguity caused by spatio-temporal under-sampling can be removed in an efficient way. As a result, these two parameters can be efficiently estimated by reusing the observation data collected in parallel at different undersampling rates, which remarkably improves the data utilization. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed joint scheme is highly accurate.

We discuss Nash equilibria in combinatorial auctions with item bidding. Specifically, we give a characterization for the existence of a Nash equilibrium in a combinatorial auction with item bidding when valuations by n bidders satisfy symmetric and subadditive properties. By this characterization, we can obtain an algorithm for deciding whether a Nash equilibrium exists in such a combinatorial auction.

Saliency detection for videos has been paid great attention and extensively studied in recent years. However, various visual scene with complicated motions leads to noticeable background noise and non-uniformly highlighting the foreground objects. In this paper, we proposed a video saliency detection model using spatio-temporal cues. In spatial domain, the location of foreground region is utilized as spatial cue to constrain the accumulation of contrast for background regions. In temporal domain, the spatial distribution of motion-similar regions is adopted as temporal cue to further suppress the background noise. Moreover, a backward matching based temporal prediction method is developed to adjust the temporal saliency according to its corresponding prediction from the previous frame, thus enforcing the consistency along time axis. The performance evaluation on several popular benchmark data sets validates that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-arts.

The commonly used Deep Q Networks is known to overestimate action values under certain conditions. It's also proved that overestimations do harm to performance, which might cause instability and divergence of learning. In this paper, we present the Deep Sarsa and Q Networks (DSQN) algorithm, which can considered as an enhancement to the Deep Q Networks algorithm. First, DSQN algorithm takes advantage of the experience replay and target network techniques in Deep Q Networks to improve the stability of neural networks. Second, double estimator is utilized for Q-learning to reduce overestimations. Especially, we introduce Sarsa learning to Deep Q Networks for removing overestimations further. Finally, DSQN algorithm is evaluated on cart-pole balancing, mountain car and lunarlander control task from the OpenAI Gym. The empirical evaluation results show that the proposed method leads to reduced overestimations, more stable learning process and improved performance.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) via coupled magnetic resonances has more than ten years history of development. However, it appears frequency splitting phenomenon in the over-coupled region, thus, the output power of the two-coil WPT system achieves the maximum output power at the two splitting angular frequencies and not at the natural resonant angular frequency. By investigating the relationship between the impedances of the transmitter side and receiver side, we found that WPT system is a power superposition system, and the reasons were given to explaining how to appear the frequency splitting and impact on the maximum output power of the system in details. First, the circuit model was established and transfer characteristics of the two-coil WPT system were studied by utilizing circuit theories. Second, the mechanism of the power superposition of the WPT system was carefully researched. Third, the relationship between the impedances of the transmitter side and receiver side was obtained by investigating the impedance characteristics of a two-coil WPT system, and also the impact factors of the maximum output power of the system were obtained by using a power superposition mechanism. Finally, the experimental circuit was designed and experimental results are well consistent with the theoretical analysis.

In recent years, deep learning based approaches have substantially improved the performance of face recognition. Most existing deep learning techniques work well, but neglect effective utilization of face correlation information. The resulting performance loss is noteworthy for personal appearance variations caused by factors such as illumination, pose, occlusion, and misalignment. We believe that face correlation information should be introduced to solve this network performance problem originating from by intra-personal variations. Recently, graph deep learning approaches have emerged for representing structured graph data. A graph is a powerful tool for representing complex information of the face image. In this paper, we survey the recent research related to the graph structure of Convolutional Neural Networks and try to devise a definition of graph structure included in Compressed Sensing and Deep Learning. This paper devoted to the story explain of two properties of our graph - sparse and depth. Sparse can be advantageous since features are more likely to be linearly separable and they are more robust. The depth means that this is a multi-resolution multi-channel learning process. We think that sparse graph based deep neural network can more effectively make similar objects to attract each other, the relative, different objects mutually exclusive, similar to a better sparse multi-resolution clustering. Based on this concept, we propose a sparse graph representation based on the face correlation information that is embedded via the sparse reconstruction and deep learning within an irregular domain. The resulting classification is remarkably robust. The proposed method achieves high recognition rates of 99.61% (94.67%) on the benchmark LFW (YTF) facial evaluation database.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has a better coding efficiency comparing with H.264/AVC. However, performance enhancement results in increased computational complexity which is mainly brought by the quadtree based coding tree unit (CTU). In this paper, an early termination algorithm based on AdaBoost classifier for coding unit (CU) is proposed to accelerate the process of searching the best partition for CTU. Experiment results indicate that our method can save 39% computational complexity on average at the cost of increasing Bjontegaard-Delta rate (BD-rate) by 0.18.

Association rule mining discovers relationships among variables in a data set, representing them as rules. These are expected to often have predictive abilities, that is, to be able to predict future events, but commonly used rule interestingness measures, such as support and confidence, do not directly assess their predictive power. This paper proposes a cross-validation -based metric that quantifies the predictive power of such rules for characterizing software defects. The results of evaluation this metric experimentally using four open-source data sets (Mylyn, NetBeans, Apache Ant and jEdit) show that it can improve rule prioritization performance over conventional metrics (support, confidence and odds ratio) by 72.8% for Mylyn, 15.0% for NetBeans, 10.5% for Apache Ant and 0 for jEdit in terms of SumNormPre(100) precision criterion. This suggests that the proposed metric can provide better rule prioritization performance than conventional metrics and can at least provide similar performance even in the worst case.

This paper proposes methods of finding a ranked list of entities for a given query (e.g. “Kennin-ji”, “Tenryu-ji”, or “Kinkaku-ji” for the query “ancient zen buddhist temples in kyoto”) by leveraging different types of modifiers in the query through identifying corresponding properties (e.g. established date and location for the modifiers “ancient” and “kyoto”, respectively). While most major search engines provide the entity search functionality that returns a list of entities based on users' queries, entities are neither presented for a wide variety of search queries, nor in the order that users expect. To enhance the effectiveness of entity search, we propose two entity ranking methods. Our first proposed method is a Web-based entity ranking that directly finds relevant entities from Web search results returned in response to the query as a whole, and propagates the estimated relevance to the other entities. The second proposed method is a property-based entity ranking that ranks entities based on properties corresponding to modifiers in the query. To this end, we propose a novel property identification method that identifies a set of relevant properties based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) using our seven criteria that are effective for different types of modifiers. The experimental results showed that our proposed property identification method could predict more relevant properties than using each of the criteria separately. Moreover, we achieved the best performance for returning a ranked list of relevant entities when using the combination of the Web-based and property-based entity ranking methods.