In this paper, we focus on two-layer wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that consist of sensor-concentrator and inter-concentrator networks. In order to collect as much data as possible from a wide area, improving of network capacity is essential because data collection applications often require to gather data within a limited period, i.e., acceptable collection delay. Therefore, we propose a two-stage scheduling method for inter-concentrator networks. The proposed method first strictly schedules time slots of links with heavy interference and congestion by exploiting the combination metric of interference and traffic demand. After that, it simply schedules time slots of the remaining sinks to mitigate complexity. Simulation-based evaluations show our proposal offers much larger capacity than conventional scheduling algorithms. In particular, our proposal improves up to 70% capacity compared with the conventional methods in situations where the proportion of one- and two-hop links is small.

In this paper, a spectrum efficient spatial polarized quadrature amplitude modulation (SPQM) scheme for physical layer security in dual-polarized satellite systems is proposed, which uses the carrier's polarization state, amplitude, phase and the polarization characteristics of the transmitting beams as information bearing parameters, which can improve the transmission efficiency and enhance the transmission security at the same time. As we know, the depolarization effect is the main drawback that affects the symbol error rate performance when polarization states are used to carry information. To solve the problem, we exploit an additional degree of freedom, time, in the proposed scheme, which means that two components of the polarized signal are transmitted in turn in two symbol periods, thus they can be recovered without mutual interference. Furthermore, orthogonal polarizations of the transmitting beam are used as spatial modulation for further increasing the throughput. In addition, in order to improve the transmission security, two transmitting beams are designed to transmit the two components of the polarized signal respectively. In this way, a secure transmission link is formed from the transmitter to the receiver to prevent eavesdropping. Finally, superiorities of SPQM are validated by the theoretical analysis and simulation results in dual-polarized satellite systems.

Cognitive orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems are spectrum-efficient yet vulnerable to intercarrier interference (ICI), especially in high-mobility scenarios. In this paper, the energy efficiency optimization problem in high-mobility cognitive OFDM system is considered. The aim is to maximize the energy efficiency by adapting subcarrier bandwidth, power allocation and sensing duration in the presence of ICI, under the constraints of the total power budget of secondary networks, the probabilistic interference limits for the protection of primary networks, and the subcarrier spacing restriction for high-mobility OFDM systems. In order to tackle the intractable non-convex optimization problem induced by ICI, an ICI-aware power allocation algorithm is proposed, by referring to noncooperative game theory. Moreover, a near-optimal subcarrier bandwidth search algorithm based on golden section methods is also presented to maximize the system energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can achieve a considerable energy efficiency improvement by up to 133% compared to the traditional static subcarrier bandwidth and power allocation schemes.

In cellular network environments, where users are not evenly distributed across cells, overloaded base stations handling many users have difficulties in providing effective and fair services with their limited resources. Additionally, users at the cell edge may suffer from the potential problems resulting from low signal-to-interference ratio owing to the incessant interference from adjacent cells. In this paper, we propose a relay-assisted load balancing scheme to resolve these traffic imbalance. The proposed scheme can improve the performance of the overall network by utilizing relay stations to divert heavy traffic to other cells, and by adopting a partial frequency-reuse scheme to mitigate inter-cell interference. Each user and relay station calculates its own utility influence in the neighboring candidates for reassociation and decides whether to stay or move to another cell presenting the maximum total network utility increment. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the overall network fairness to users by improving the performance of cell boundary users without degrading the total network throughput. We achieve a system performance gain of 16 ∼ 35% when compared with conventional schemes, while ensuring fairness among users.

This paper newly proposes a fast computation technique on the method of image Green's function for p-characteristic calculations, when a plane wave with the transverse wavenumber p is incident on a periodic rough surface having perfect conductivity. In the computation of p-characteristics, based on a spectral domain periodicity of the periodic image Green's function, the image integral equation for a given incidence p maintains the same form for other particular incidences except for the excitation term. By means of a quadrature method, such image integral equations lead to matrix equations. Once the first given matrix equation is performed by a solution procedure as calculations of its matrix elements and its inverse matrix, the other matrix equations for other particular incidences no longer need such a solution procedure. Thus, the total CPU time for the computation of p-characteristics is largely reduced in complex shaped surface cases, huge roughness cases or large period cases.

In the plane wave scattering from a periodic grating high order diffracted plane waves disappear at a low grazing angle limit of incidence. In this paper the scattering of a beam wave by the end-face of an ordered waveguide system composed of identical cores of equal space is treated by the perturbation method and the scattered field is analytically derived. The possibility that high order diffracted beam waves remain at a low grazing angle limit of incidence is shown.

360 videos have recently become a popular virtual reality content type. However, a good quality metric for 360 videos is still an open issue. In this work, our goal is to identify appropriate objective quality metrics for 360 video communications. Especially, fourteen objective quality measures at different processing phases are considered. Also, a subjective test is conducted in this study. The relationship between objective quality and subjective quality is investigated. It is found that most of the PSNR-related quality measures are well correlated with subjective quality. However, for evaluating video quality across different contents, a content-based quality metric is needed.

We have proposed an audio watermarking method based on modification of sound pressure level between channels. This method is focused on the invariability of sound localization against sound processing like MP3 and the imperceptibility about slightly change of sound localization. In this paper, we investigate about tolerance evaluation against various attacks in reference to IHC criteria.

Knowledge graphs (KG) play a crucial role in many modern applications. However, constructing a KG from natural language text is challenging due to the complex structure of the text. Recently, many approaches have been proposed to transform natural language text to triples to obtain KGs. Such approaches have not yet provided efficient results for mapping extracted elements of triples, especially the predicate, to their equivalent elements in a KG. Predicate mapping is essential because it can reduce the heterogeneity of the data and increase the searchability over a KG. In this article, we propose T2KG, an automatic KG creation framework for natural language text, to more effectively map natural language text to predicates. In our framework, a hybrid combination of a rule-based approach and a similarity-based approach is presented for mapping a predicate to its corresponding predicate in a KG. Based on experimental results, the hybrid approach can identify more similar predicate pairs than a baseline method in the predicate mapping task. An experiment on KG creation is also conducted to investigate the performance of the T2KG. The experimental results show that the T2KG also outperforms the baseline in KG creation. Although KG creation is conducted in open domains, in which prior knowledge is not provided, the T2KG still achieves an F1 score of approximately 50% when generating triples in the KG creation task. In addition, an empirical study on knowledge population using various text sources is conducted, and the results indicate the T2KG could be used to obtain knowledge that is not currently available from DBpedia.

The emergency response process is quite complex since there is a wide variety of elements to be evaluated for taking decisions. Uncertainties generated by subjectivity and imprecision affect the safety and effectiveness of actions. The aim of this paper is to develop an onto-logy for emergency response protocols, in particular, to fires in buildings. This developed ontology supports the knowledge sharing, evaluation and review of the protocols used, contributing to the tactical and strategic planning of organizations. The construction of the ontology was based on the methodology Methontology. The domain specification and conceptualization were based in qualitative research, in which were evaluated 131 terms with definitions, of which 85 were approved by specialists. From there, in the Protégé tool, the domain's taxonomy and the axioms were created. The specialists validated the ontology using the assessment by human approach (taxonomy, application and structure). Thus, a sustainable ontology model to the rescue tactical phase was ensured.

Multi-camera videos with abundant information and high flexibility are useful in a wide range of applications, such as surveillance systems, web lectures, news broadcasting, concerts and sports viewing. Viewers can enjoy an enhanced viewing experience by choosing their own viewpoint through viewing interfaces. However, some viewers may feel annoyed by the need for continual manual viewpoint selection, especially when the number of selectable viewpoints is relatively large. In order to solve this issue, we propose an automatic viewpoint navigation method designed especially for sports. This method focuses on a viewer's personal preference for viewpoint selection, instead of common and professional editing rules. We assume that different trajectory distributions of viewing objects cause a difference in the viewpoint selection according to personal preference. We learn the relationship between the viewer's personal viewpoint-selection tendency and the spatio-temporal game context represented by the objects trajectories. We compare three methods based on Gaussian mixture model, SVM with a general histogram and SVM with a bag-of-words to seek the best learning scheme for this relationship. The performance of the proposed methods are evaluated by assessing the degree of similarity between the selected viewpoints and the viewers' edited records.

Block compressed sensing (CS) with optimal permutation is a promising method to improve sampling efficiency in CS-based image compression. However, the existing optimal permutation scheme brings a large amount of extra data to encode the permutation information because it needs to know the permutation information to accomplish signal reconstruction. When the extra data is taken into consideration, the improvement in sampling efficiency of this method is limited. In order to solve this problem, a new optimal permutation strategy for block CS (BCS) is proposed. Based on the proposed permutation strategy, an improved optimal permutation based BCS method called BCS-NOP (BCS with new optimal permutation) is proposed in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed approach reduces the amount of extra data to encode the permutation information significantly and thereby improves the sampling efficiency compared with the existing optimal permutation based BCS approach.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is to identify the right sense of ambiguous words via mining their context information. Previous studies show that classifier combination is an effective approach to enhance the performance of WSD. In this paper, we systematically review state-of-the-art methods for classifier combination based WSD, including probability-based and voting-based approaches. Furthermore, a new classifier combination based WSD, namely the probability weighted voting method with dynamic self-adaptation, is proposed in this paper. Compared with existing approaches, the new method can take into consideration both the differences of classifiers and ambiguous instances. Exhaustive experiments are performed on a real-world dataset, the results show the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods.

Encoded lookup tables used in white-box cryptography are known to be vulnerable to power analysis due to the imbalanced encoding. This means that the countermeasures against white-box attacks can not even defend against gray-box attacks. For this reason, those who want to defend against power analysis through the white-box cryptographic implementation need to find other ways. In this paper, we propose a method to defend power analysis without resolving the problematic encoding problem. Compared with the existing white-box cryptography techniques, the proposed method has twice the size of the lookup table and nearly the same amount of computation.

Object detection has been a hot topic of image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition. In recent years, training a model from labeled images using machine learning technique becomes popular. However, the relationship between training samples is usually ignored by existing approaches. To address this problem, a novel approach is proposed, which trains Siamese convolutional neural network on feature pairs and finely tunes the network driven by a small amount of training samples. Since the proposed method considers not only the discriminative information between objects and background, but also the relationship between intraclass features, it outperforms the state-of-arts on real images.

In Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), spectrum sensing is performed by secondary (unlicensed) users to utilize transmission opportunities, so-called white spaces or spectrum holes, in the primary (licensed) frequency bands. Secondary users (SUs) perform sensing upon arrival to find an idle channel for transmission as well as during transmission to avoid interfering with primary users (PUs). In practice, spectrum sensing is not perfect and sensing errors including false alarms and misdetections are inevitable. In this paper, we develop a continuous-time Markov chain model to study the effect of false alarms and misdetections of SUs on several performance measures including the collision rate between PUs and SUs, the throughput of SUs and the SU delay in a CRN. Numerical results indicate that sensing errors can have a high impact on the performance measures.

A wideband CMOS common-gate low-noise amplifier (LNA) with high linearity is proposed. The linearity is improved by dual cross-coupled feedback technique. A passive cross-coupled feedback removes the second-order harmonic feedback effect to the input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3), which is known as one of the limitations for linearity enhancement using feedback. An active cross-coupled feedback, constituted by a voltage combiner and a feedback capacitor is employed to enhance loop gain, and acquire further linearity improvement. An enhanced LC-match input network and forward isolation of active cross-coupled feedback enable the proposed LNA with wideband input matching and flat gain performance. Fabricated in a 0.13 µm RF CMOS process, the LNA achieves a flat voltage gain of 13 dB, an NF of 2.6∼3.8 dB, and an IIP3 of 3.6∼4.9 dBm over a 3 dB bandwidth of 0.1∼1.3 GHz. It consumes only 3.2 mA from a 1.2 V supply and occupies an area of 480×418 um2. In contrast to those of reported wideband LNAs, the proposed LNA has the merit of low power consumption and high linearity.

Data anonymization is required before a big-data business can run effectively without compromising the privacy of personal information it uses. It is not trivial to choose the best algorithm to anonymize some given data securely for a given purpose. In accurately assessing the risk of data being compromised, there needs to be a balance between utility and security. Therefore, using common pseudo microdata, we propose a competition for the best anonymization and re-identification algorithm. The paper reported the result of the competition and the analysis on the effective of anonymization technique. The competition result reveals that there is a tradeoff between utility and security, and 20.9% records were re-identified in average.

The generalized spatial modulation (GSM) is a new transmission technique that can realize high-performance multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems with a low RF complexity. This paper presents an efficient sphere decoding method used to perform the symbol detection for the generalized spatial modulation (GSM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In the proposed method, the cost metric is modified so that it does not include the cancellation of the nonexistent interference. The modified cost metric can be computed by formulating a detection tree that has a regular structure representing the transmit antenna combinations as well as the symbol vectors, both of which are detected efficiently by finding the shortest path on the basis of an efficient tree search algorithm. As the tree search algorithm is performed for the regular detection tree to compute the modified but mathematically-equivalent cost metric, the efficiency of the sphere decoding is improved while the bit-error rate performance is not degraded. The simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the complexity significantly when compared with the previous method: for the 6×6 64QAM GSM-MIMO system with two active antennas, the average reduction rate of the complexity is as high as 45.8% in the count of the numerical operations.

The problem of E-polarized plane wave diffraction by a thin material strip is analyzed using the Wiener-Hopf technique together with approximate boundary conditions. Exact and high-frequency asymptotic solutions are obtained. Our final solution is valid for the case where the strip thickness is small and the strip width is large in comparison to the wavelength. The scattered field is evaluated asymptotically based on the saddle point method and a far field expression is derived. Numerical examples on the radar cross section (RCS) are presented for various physical parameters and the scattering characteristics of the strip are discussed in detail.