A plasma lighting system (PLS) using a solid-state (SS) radio frequency (RF) power amplifier (PA) is one of the promising lighting systems due to its excellent light characteristics and power efficiency. To improve the efficacy and reduce the adjacent channel interference of the PLS, a method to generate a band-limited pulsed-RF signal using the limited number of multi-tone signals is proposed. A 2.49 GHz PLS with a 300W gallium-nitride (GaN) SSPA is implemented, and it is used to verify the proposed method. The PLS using the proposed method shows better performance compared with those using conventional pulsed-RF signal.

We demonstrate on the basis of ab initio calculations that metal-oxide-nitride-oxide-semiconductor (MONOS) memory is one of the most promising future high-density archive memories. We find that O related defects in a MONOS memory cause irreversible structural changes to the SiO2/Si3N4 interface at the atomistic level during program/erase (P/E) cycles. Carrier injection during the programming operation makes the structure energetically very stable, because all the O atoms in this structure take on three-fold-coordination. The estimated lifespan of the programmed state is of the order of a thousand years.

In this letter, three types of constructions for multipermutation codes are investigated by using interleaving technique and single-deletion permutation codes to correct a predetermined number of adjacent deletions. The decoding methods for the proposed codes are provided in proofs and verified with examples. The rates of these multipermutation codes are also compared.

In recent years, spectrum sharing has received much attention as a technique for more efficient spectrum use. In the case in which all providers are cooperative, spectrum sensing can easily be realized and can improve user throughput (on average). If that is not the case, providers are not cooperative, i.e., spectrum trading, spectrum bands are rented to promote spectrum sharing. To ensure more profit, however, non-cooperative providers must correctly estimate the fluctuation of the number of connected users to be able to determine the offered channel price. In this paper, we propose a spectrum sharing method to achieve both higher throughput and provider profit via appropriate pricing using a disaggregate behavioral model. Finally, we confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method using simulation experiments.

This paper presents a novel 60 GHz-band photonic-integrated array-antenna and module for radio-over-fiber (RoF)-based beam forming. An integrated photonic array-antennas (IPA), where eight photodiodes and 4×2 arrayed patch-antenna are integrated in a single board, is actually fabricated, and 3.5-Gbit/s QPSK digital signal transmission with beam forming of the IPA is experimentally demonstrated. In addition, a novel 60-GHz compact antenna module is proposed and fabricated for increasing the number of antenna elements and flexibility creating various beam patterns. The feasibility of beam forming operation for the proposed antenna module is confirmed by a 60-GHz RoF transmission experiment. The capability of detecting the mobile terminal direction, which is one of the indispensable functions for actual environment, is also studied. The obtained results in this paper will be useful for designing future radio access networks based on RoF transmission technology.

We present dynamic mode switching characteristic by using a 2 × 2 optical mode switch based on silicon waveguide. The configuration of optical mode switch is similar to MZI where the width of input and output ports are designed to permit the combining of the fundamental mode and the first order mode. We designed the symmetrical arms with phase shifter based on p-i-n structure in one arm to generate a π-phase difference between each arm. As a result, mode switching with the injection current of 60mA (5.7V) was successfully achieved with the mode crosstalk of -10dB at λ=1550nm. A minimum of less than 60ns and 40ns mode switching time for the fundamental mode to first order mode and first order mode to fundamental mode, was achieved respectively in this time.

A fully-integrated system-on-chip (SoC) for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with 3.2mA RX and 3.5mA TX current consumption is presented. To achieve both low current consumption and high performance, the SoC employs a sliding-IF architecture with high tolerance against out-of-band-blocking signals, a power management unit with improved efficiency, and techniques to reduce current in core circuits. The SoC achieves RX sensitivity of -93dBm and maximum output power of 0dBm. The SoC is in compliance with version 4.2 of the Bluetooth specifications and with the radio regulations of the FCC, ETSI, and ARIB. The SoC achieves the minimum level of current consumption for both RX and TX modes in the published product-level SoCs.

The Life Intelligence and Office Information System (LOIS) Technical Committee of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) dates its origin to May 1986. This Technical Committee (TC) has covered the research fields of the office related systems for more than 30 years. Over this time, this TC, under its multiple name changes, has served as a forum for research and provided many opportunities for not only office users but also ordinary users of systems and services to present ideas and discussions. Therefore, these advanced technologies have been diffused from big enterprises to small companies and home users responsible for their management and operation. This paper sums up the technology trends and views of the office related systems and services covered in the 30 years of presentations of the LOIS Technical Committees by using the new literature analysis system based on the IEICE Knowledge Discovery system (I-Scover system).

We propose a method for automatic emphasis estimation using conditional random fields. In our experiments, the value of F-measure obtained using our proposed method (0.31) was higher than that obtained using a random emphasis method (0.20), a method using TF-IDF (0.21), and a method based on LexRank (0.26). On the contrary, the value of F-measure of obtained using our proposed method (0.28) was slightly worse as compared with that obtained using manual estimation (0.26-0.40, with an average of 0.35).

Emerging digital payment services, also known as FinTech, have enabled various types of advanced payment transactions (such as Google Wallet, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, etc.). However, offline peer-to-peer cash transactions still make up about 25.6% of the overall financial transactions in everyday life. By investigating existing online and offline payment systems, we identify three key challenges for building a digital cash transaction system with core features of the offline cash transactions: self-verifiability of digital cash; user anonymity; atomic cash transfer for double spending/depositing protection. In this paper, we propose OPERA, an offline peer-to-peer digital cash transaction system that addresses the three challenges. It newly introduces a concept of ‘one-time-readable memory(ORM)’ and ‘digital token’ which is a unit of self-verifiable digital cash. The one-time readability from ORM and three-stage token exchange protocol enable OPERA to provide uniqueness to digital cash and to allow a complete offline digital payment. OPERA devices are enhanced with TCPA technology to ensure the integrity of the physical device package. To evaluate the feasibility and resilience of the OPERA design, we built a prototype on a customized embedded board.

Group signature (GS) schemes guarantee anonymity of the actual signer among group members. Previous GS schemes assume that randomness in signing is never exposed. However, in the real world, full randomness exposure can be caused by implementation problems (e.g., using a bad random number generator). In this paper, we study (im)possibility of achieving anonymity against full randomness exposure. First, we formulate a new security model for GS schemes capturing full randomness exposure. Next, we clarify that it is impossible to achieve full-anonymity against full randomness exposure without any secure component (e.g., a tamper-proof module or a trusted outside storage). Finally, we show a possibility result that selfless-anonymity can be achieved against full randomness exposure. While selfless-anonymity is weaker than full-anonymity, it is strong enough in practice. Our transformation is quite simple; and thus, previous GS schemes used in real-world systems can be easily replaced by a slight modification to strengthen the security.

A 42×42-way one-body 2-D beam-switching Butler matrix with waveguide short-slot 2-plane couplers is designed and fabricated in the 22GHz band. The one-body configuration using the commutativity and the overlapping of units allows reducing the size and loss in comparison with a cascade of matrices beam-switching for the horizontal and the vertical planes. It is achieved by replacing 2×2-way 1-plane couplers in the conventional block configuration for a Butler matrix with 22×22-way 2-plane couplers. The measured bandwidth is approximately 2% restricted by the frequency characteristics of the 2-plane couplers. In the radiation from the aperture array antenna of the 42 output ports, the 3.9dB-down coverage of 3-D solid angle by the sixteen beams is around 1.72 steradian which is same as 27.4% of hemisphere at the design frequency for the aperture spacing of 0.73×0.73 wavelength.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard enables a short range, low data rate and low power communication between devices in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In IEEE 802.15.4, a slotted carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) algorithm is employed to coordinate a large number of sensor devices. Unlike IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN), energy consumption requirements enable it to use fewer number of backoffs, which adversely increase collisions, resulting in degradation of energy consumption. In this letter, we devise an adaptive backoff scheme in WSN whose backoff range is adjusted depending on the contention level, and present its Markov model for mathematical analysis. The proposed scheme is analyzed and its efficiency is validated by ns-2 simulation in respect to network throughput and energy consumption. Its performance is also compared with the standard and previous works, showing that it outperforms them for a whole range of arrival rate.

This paper presents an application of low-coherence interferometry for measurement of mode field diameters (MFDs) of a few-mode fiber and shows its performance compared with another method using a mode multiplexer. We found that the presented method could measure MFDs in a few-mode fiber even without any special mode multiplexers.

With the rapid spread of smart devices, such as smartphones and tablet PCs, user authentication is becoming increasingly important because various kinds of data concerning user privacy are processed within them. At present, in the case of smart devices, password-based authentication is frequently used; however, biometric authentication has attracted more attention as a user authentication technology. A smart device is equipped with various sensors, such as cameras, microphones, and touch panels, many of which enable biometric information to be obtained. While the function of biometric authentication is available in many smart devices, there remain some problems to be addressed for more secure and convenient user authentication. In this paper, we summarize the current problems with user authentication on smart devices and propose a novel user authentication system based on the concept of context awareness to resolve these problems. We also present our evaluation of the performance of the system by using biometric information that was acquired from smart devices. The evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our system.

In this paper, an improved lattice reduction (LR)-aided soft-output multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detector is proposed. Conventional LR-aided soft-output MIMO detectors involve the empty set problem (ESP), in which an entry with a particular bit in the candidate list might not exist. To overcome the performance degradation resulting from this ESP, a post-processing algorithm that modifies the candidate list is proposed. The proposed algorithm efficiently resolves the ESP by utilizing the near-orthogonality of the lattice-reduced system model so that the bit error rate (BER) performance is enhanced. In addition, as the complexity of the candidate list generation is reduced with the aid of the post-processing algorithm, the overall complexity is also reduced. Simulation results and the complexity comparisons demonstrate that our proposed method lowers the required Eb/No by 4-5 dB at the BER of 10-5 and the complexity by 13%-55%, compared to the conventional method.

Multi-label classification is an appealing and challenging supervised learning problem, where multiple labels, rather than a single label, are associated with an unseen test instance. To remove possible noises in labels and features of high-dimensionality, multi-label dimension reduction has attracted more and more attentions in recent years. The existing methods usually suffer from several problems, such as ignoring label outliers and label correlations. In addition, most of them emphasize on conducting dimension reduction in an unsupervised or supervised way, therefore, unable to utilize the label information or a large amount of unlabeled data to improve the performance. In order to cope with these problems, we propose a novel method termed Robust sEmi-supervised multi-lAbel DimEnsion Reduction, shortly READER. From the viewpoint of empirical risk minimization, READER selects most discriminative features for all the labels in a semi-supervised way. Specifically, the ℓ2,1-norm induced loss function and regularization term make READER robust to the outliers in the data points. READER finds a feature subspace so as to keep originally neighbor instances close and embeds labels into a low-dimensional latent space nonlinearly. To optimize the objective function, an efficient algorithm is developed with convergence property. Extensive empirical studies on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.