To substantially alleviate the human blockage problem in mmWave communications, this paper proposes a proactive handover system based on human blockage prediction using RGB and depth (RGB-D) cameras. The proposed scheme uses RGB-D camera images to estimate the mobility of pedestrians and to predict when blockage will occur. On the basis of this information, the proposed system transfers a mobile station (STA) communicating with one wireless BS (base station) to another BS before human blockage occurs and thus avoids blockage-induced throughput degradation. This paper presents performance modeling of both proactive handover scheme and reactive handover scheme which is based on the received power level. A numerical evaluation reveals conditions under which the proactive handover scheme achieves higher spectral efficiency compared to reactive scheme. In addition, using IEEE 802.11ad-based wireless local area network (WLAN) devices, a testbed for implementing the proposed system is built. The innovative experimental results demonstrate that the proactive handover system can considerably reduce the duration of human blockage-induced degradation of throughput performance relative to the reactive scheme.

With the increase of data quantity, people have begun to attach importance to cloud storage. However, numerous security accidents occurred to cloud servers recently, thus triggering thought about the security of traditional single cloud. In other words, traditional single cloud can't ensure the privacy of users' data to a certain extent. To solve those security issues, multi-cloud systems which spread data over multiple cloud storage servers emerged. They employ a series of erasure codes and other keyless dispersal algorithms to achieve high-level security. But non-systematic codes like RS require relatively complex arithmetic, and systematic codes have relatively weaker security. In terms of keyless dispersal algorithms, they avoid key management issues but not suit to complete parallel optimization or deduplication which is important to limited cloud storage resources. So in this paper, we design a new kind of XOR-based non-systematic erasure codes - Privacy Protecting Codes (PPC) and a SIMD encoding algorithm for better performance. To achieve higher-level security, we put forward a novel deduplication-friendly dispersal algorithm called Hash Cyclic Encryption-PPC (HCE-PPC) which can achieve complete parallelization. With these new technologies, we present a multi-cloud storage system called CloudS. For better user experience and the tradeoffs between security and performance, CloudS provides multiple levels of security by various combinations of compression, encryption and coding schemes. We implement CloudS as a web application which doesn't require users to perform complicated operations on local.

In this work, the novel fingerprinting evaluation parameter, which is called the punishment cost, is proposed. This parameter can be calculated from the designed matrix, the punishment matrix, and the confusion matrix. The punishment cost can describe how well the result of positioning is in the designated grid or not, by which the conventional parameter, the accuracy, cannot describe. The experiment is done with real measured data on weekdays and weekends. The results are considered in terms of accuracy and the punishment cost. Three well-known machine learning algorithms, i.e. Decision Tree, k-Nearest Neighbors, and Artificial Neural Network, are verified in fingerprinting positioning. In experimental environment, Decision Tree can perform well on the data from weekends whereas the performance is underrated on the data from weekdays. The k-Nearest Neighbors has proper punishment costs, even though it has lower accuracy than that of Artificial Neural Network, which has moderate accuracies but lower punishment costs. Therefore, other criteria should be considered in order to select the algorithm for indoor positioning. In addition, punishment cost can facilitate the conversion spot positioning to floor positioning without data modification.

We arrange disaster mitigation activities into temporal order and discuss the contribution of information and communications technology (ICT) to the reduction of disaster damage in the stages of precaution, emergency response, and post-mortem study. Examples of the current contribution of ICT are introduced and future possible uses of ICT are discussed. We focus on the contribution of ICT to decision-making in emergency responses by augmenting human intelligence. Research directions of ICT for disaster mitigation technology are summarized in the categories “tough ICT”, “intelligence amplification for decision-making in disaster mitigation” and “safe ICT.”

The purpose of this paper is to show that a new type of information-theoretic learning method called “potential learning” can be used to detect and extract important tweets among a great number of redundant ones. In the experiment, we used a dataset of 10,000 tweets, among which there existed only a few important ones. The experimental results showed that the new method improved overall classification accuracy by correctly identifying the important tweets.

Side channel attacks (SCAs) on security devices have become a major concern for system security. Existing SCA countermeasures are costly in terms of area and power consumption. This paper presents a novel differential power analysis (DPA) countermeasure referred to as short-time three-phase single-rail precharge logic (STSPL). The proposed logic is based on a single-rail three-phase operation scheme providing effective DPA-resistance with low cost. In the scheme, a controller is inserted to discharge logic gates by reusing evaluation paths to achieve more balanced power consumption. This reduces the latency between different phases, increasing the difficult of the adversary to conduct DPA, compared with the state-of-the-art DPA-resistance logics. To verify the chip's power consumption in practice, a 4-bit ripple carry adder and a 4-bit inverter of AES-SBOX were implemented. The testing and simulation results of DPA attacks prove the security and efficiency of the proposed logic.

In this paper, a new scheme is presented for ground moving target indication for multichannel high-resolution wide-swath (HRWS) SAR systems with modified reconstruction filters. The conventional steering vector is generalized for moving targets through taking into account the additional Doppler centroid shift caused by the across-track velocity. Two modified steering vectors with symmetric velocity information are utilized to produce two images for the same scene. Due to the unmatched steering vectors, the stationary backgrounds are defocused but they still hold the same intensities in both images but moving targets are blurred to different extents. The ambiguous components of the moving targets can also be suppressed due to the beamforming in the reconstruction procedure. Therefore, ground moving target indication can be carried out via intensity comparison between the two images. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by both simulated and real airborne SAR data.

In the most recent processor designs, memory access latency is shortened by adopting a memory hierarchy. In this configuration, the memory consists of a main memory, which comprises dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and a cache memory, which consists of static random-access memory (SRAM). A cache memory, which is now used in increasingly large volumes, accounts for a vast proportion of the energy consumption of the overall processor. There are two ways to reduce the energy consumption of the cache memory: by decreasing the number of accesses, and by minimizing the energy consumed per access. In this study, we reduce the size of the L1 cache by compressing frequent bit sequences, thus cutting the energy consumed per access. A “frequent bit sequence” is a specific bit pattern that often appears in high-order bits of data retained in the cache memory. Our proposed mechanism, which is based on measurements using a software simulator, cuts energy consumption by 41.0% on average as compared with conventional mechanisms.

In this paper, we study the problem of a Boolean function can be represented as the sum of two bent functions. This problem was recently presented by N. Tokareva when studying the number of bent functions [27]. Firstly, several classes of functions, such as quadratic Boolean functions, Maiorana-MacFarland bent functions, many partial spread functions etc, are proved to be able to be represented as the sum of two bent functions. Secondly, methods to construct such functions from low dimension ones are also introduced. N. Tokareva's main hypothesis is proved for n≤6. Moreover, two hypotheses which are equivalent to N. Tokareva's main hypothesis are presented. These hypotheses may lead to new ideas or methods to solve this problem. Finally, necessary and sufficient conditions on the problem when the sum of several bent functions is again a bent function are given.

With the decrease in transistor feature size, power consumption, especially leakage power, has become a most important design concern. Because of their superior electrical properties and design flexibility, fin-type field-effect transistors (FinFETs) seem to be the most promising option in low-power applications. In order to support the VLSI digital system design flow based on logic synthesis, this paper proposes a design method for low-power high-performance standard cells based on IG-mode FinFETs. Such a method is derived on the basis of appropriately and artfully designing and optimizing the stacked structures in each standard cell, and applying the mixed forward and reverse back-gate bias technique in a well-chosen manner. The proposed method is also applicable when the supply voltage reduces to 0.5V to further reduce the leakage power consumption. By applying this design method, optimized IG-mode FinFET standard cells are generated, and they form a low-power high-performance standard cell library. Simulation results of the library cells indicate that the performance of the standard cells designed with the proposed method can be maintained while reducing leakage consumption by a factor of 58.9 at most. The 16-bit ripple carry adder implemented with this library can acquire up to 17.5% leakage power reduction.

This paper presents an efficient secure auction protocol for M+1st price auction. In our proposed protocol, a bidding price of a player is represented as a binary expression, while in the previous protocol it is represented as an integer. Thus, when the number of players is m and the bidding price is an integer up to p, compared to the complexity of the previous protocol which is a polynomial of m and p, the complexity of our protocol is a polynomial of m and log p. We apply the Boneh-Goh-Nissim encryption to the mix-and-match protocol to reduce the computation costs.

As the demand for higher transmission rates and spectral efficiency is steadily increasing, the research and development of novel mobile communication systems has gained momentum. This paper focuses on providing a comprehensive survey of research and development activities on fifth generation mobile communication systems in Japan. We try to survey a vast area of wireless communication systems and the developments that led to future 5G systems.

A link adaptation scheme is devised for vector-perturbation (VP) zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) MIMO precoding and a link-adaptable VP-ZFBF precoder is applied to multi-point three-dimensional (3D) beamformers to be used in mmWave-band wireless access systems. Channel coding schemes used in current systems, e.g., turbo codes, possess systematic code structures. The VP gain can thus be predicted by searching for perturbation vectors for the symbol vectors mapped from information bits. On the basis of this principle, we constructed an efficient iterative modulation-and-coding-set (MCS) selection procedure for VP-ZFBF precoding. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme suitably passed on the VP gain to the selection of an appropriate higher-rate MCS index and thus achieved high throughputs by incorporating with multi-point 3D-beamformers.

A demonstration of power enhancement by nonlinear oscillation in a millimeter-sized electrostatic vibrational energy harvester for the future Internet of Things is presented. To enable nonlinearity in microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices, we selected a gold spring as a component of the MEMS structure for its lower Young's modulus than conventional materials, a ductile characteristic, and an electrical conductivity. The mechanical characteristics of the fabricated MEMS device related to the nonlinear phenomenon were examined. The charging characteristics of an ethylene tetrafluoroethylene copolymer (ETFE) electret film for electrostatic induction were also evaluated. Nonlinear oscillation for the millimeter-sized energy harvester with the ETFE electret was confirmed experimentally by applying external vibration. The oscillation resulted in a bandwidth two times broader than that by linear oscillation. The normalized harvester effectiveness of the nonlinear oscillation was 5.1 times higher than that of the linear one.

We propose a highly sensitive carrier-recovery system for in-line amplification for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signals in a periodically poled LiNbO3 based phase sensitive amplifier (PSA). We applied a discrete two-stage second harmonic generation/difference frequency generation (SHG/DFG) parametric conversion scheme to enhance the sensitivity of the carrier recovery. Owing to this two-stage SHG/DFG scheme, the conversion efficiency of the seed light for the injection locking needed for the pump generation can be improved compared to that of the cascaded SHG/DFG scheme. The new discrete scheme might also prevent the SNR degradation of the seed light caused by the ASE from the booster EDFA compared with the previous system that used the cascaded scheme. This novel carrier-recovery system exhibits high sensitivity with the SNR of over 7.8dB of the seed light, while tapped signal power is as low as -50dBm, which is low enough for injection locking. The new in-line PSA with this carrier-recovery system exhibits high gain of over 11dB. Since we successfully obtained the high gain property, we tried multistage amplification taking into account practical use and achieved it with both a high gain of 20dB and a noise figure that is almost as low as the standard quantum limit of a PSA.

We propose a simple configuration for colorless and directionless (CD) reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers that enables ultra-low contention add/drop operation to be achieved. In the configuration, we apply a combination of multiple small-port-count CD add/drop banks (CD banks) and round-robin CD bank assignment. Evaluation results show that the proposed configuration can substantially reduce intra-node contention rate, which is less than 0.1%. We also find that the proposed configuration can improve the utilization efficiency of wavelength resources and transponders. We discuss the mechanism of how the proposed configuration reduces intra-node contention by analyzing the status of wavelength assignments in direction ports and CD banks.

A novel optical high order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transmission system for high-speed short links is described. Dual-polarization (DP) QAM and twin local lights are generated from one light source in the system, and these lightwaves are simultaneously transmitted via standard single mode fiber. The receiver can be constructed simply because it does not require a coherent light source under wavelength control. The system enables a 3.1 Gbaud DP-16-QAM signal to be successfully demodulated after 80-km transmission without using an optical dispersion compensator. It also achieves high tolerance against phase noise in the signal light source.

Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS) allows designers to improve energy efficiency through adjusting supply voltage at runtime in order to meet the workload demand. Previous works solving real-time DVFS problems often refer to the canonical schedules with the exponential length. Other solutions for online scheduling depend on empirical or stochastic heuristics, which potentially result in frequent fluctuations of voltage/speed scaling. This paper aims at increasing the schedule predictability using period transformation in the pinwheel task model and improves the control on power-awareness by decreasing the speeds of as many tasks as possible to the same level. Experimental results show the maximum energy savings of 6% over the recent Dynamic Power Management (DPM) method and 12% over other slack reclamation algorithms.

We study the correlation matrix element properties in array signal processing and apply them to a Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation problem of coherent or highly-correlated sources for a Uniform Linear Array (ULA). The proposed algorithm is generally based on the relation between the elements of the array correlation matrix and does not need an eigendecomposition, iteration, or angular peak-search. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated through a computer simulation.

Recently, multihop wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely developed and applied to energy efficient data collections from environments by establishing reliable transmission radio links and employing data aggregation algorithms, which can eliminate redundant transmissions and provide fusion information. In this paper, energy efficiency which consists of not only energy consumptions but also the amount of received data by the base station, as the performance metric to evaluate network utilities is presented for achieving energy efficient data collections. In order to optimize energy efficiency for improvements of network utilization, we firstly establish a graphical game theoretic model for energy efficiency in multihop WSNs, considering message length, practical energy consumptions and packet success probabilities. Afterwards, we propose a graphical protocol for performance optimization from Nash equilibrium of the graphical game theory. The approach also consists of the distributed protocol for generating optimum tree networks in practical WSNs. The experimental results show energy efficient multihop communications can be achieved by optimum tree networks of the approach. The quantitative evaluation and comparisons with related work are presented for the metric with respect to network energy consumptions and the amount of received data by the base station. The performances of our proposal are improved in all experiments. As an example, our proposal can achieve up to about 52% energy efficiency more than collection tree protocol (CTP). The corresponding tree structure is provided for the experiment.