Nitrogen adsorption on thermally cleaned Si(100) surfaces by pure and plasma excited NH$_{3}$ is investigated by extit{in situ} IR absorption spectroscopy and ex-situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy with various temperatures from RT (25$^{circ}$C) to 800$^{circ}$C and with a treatment time of 5,min. The nitrogen coverage after the treatment varies according to the treatment temperature for both pure and plasma excited NH$_{3}$. In case of the pure NH$_{3}$, the nitrogen coverage is saturated as low as 0.13--0.25 mono layer (ML) while the growth of the nitride film commenced at 550$^{circ}$C. For the plasma excited NH$_{3}$, the saturation coverage was measured at 0.54,ML at RT and it remained unincreased from RT to 550$^{circ}$C. This indicates that the plasma excited NH$_{3}$ enhances the nitrogen adsorption near at RT. It is found that main species of N is Si$_{2}=$ NH in case of the plasma excited NH$_{3}$ at RT while the pure NH$_{3}$ treatment gives rise to the Si--NH$_{2}$ passivation with Si--H at RT. We discuss the mechanism of the nitrogen adsorption on Si(100) surfaces with the plasma excited NH$_{3}$ in comparison with the study on the pure NH$_{3}$ treatment.

The IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) is based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. CSMA/CA uses a backoff mechanism to avoid collisions among stations (STAs). One disadvantage of backoff mechanisms is that STAs must wait for some period of time before transmission, which degrades spectral efficiency. Moreover, a backoff algorithm cannot completely avoid collisions. We have proposed a novel medium access control (MAC) scheme called the visual recognition-based medium access control (VRMAC) scheme, which uses an LED-camera communication technique. STAs send media-access request messages by blinking their LEDs in VRMAC scheme. An access point (AP) receives the messages via its camera, and then allocates transmission opportunities to the STAs by transmitting control frames. Since the transmission rate of the LED-camera communication is lower than WLAN transmission, the delay of access requesting causes and it could decrease the system throughput of the VRMAC system based WLAN. We reveal the effect of the delay for TCP flows and propose enhanced access procedures to eliminate the effect of the delay. Our simulation results demonstrate that VRMAC scheme increases the system throughput in UDP and TCP traffic. Moreover, the scenario-based evaluations reveal that VRMAC scheme also decreases the session delay which is a metric of quality of experience (QoE) for TCP applications.

Satellite clusters have been satisfactorily implemented in a number of applications, such as positioning and sensor networks, with the purpose of improving communication system capabilities. However, because the use of clusters requires good management of the resources, those solutions imply new challenges for communication systems. This paper focuses on improving the data management between network elements by considering a network formed by satellite clusters. Satellite clusters work in cooperation to provide real-time and non-real-time services in different footprint areas. This study proposes the adjustable energy consumption access scheme (AECS) as one possible solution response to particular necessities of communication and at the same time, as a way of decreasing the system energy consumption. Energy consumption is a key issue that concerns green network operations and it is directly linked to the cooperation and coordination between network elements. On the other hand, we support the implementation of Optical Inter-Satellite Links (OISL) for communication between cluster elements. The analysis involves the study of energy consumption, transmission delay, specific link margins, bit error rate (BER) and QoS.

In wireless networks, interference from adjacent nodes that are concurrently transmitting can cause packet reception failures and thus a significant throughput degradation. The interference can be simply avoided by assigning different orthogonal channels to each interfering node. However, if the number of orthogonal channels is smaller than that of interfering nodes, some adjacent nodes have to share the same channel and may interfere with each other. This interference can be mitigated by reducing the transmit power of the interfering nodes. In this paper, we propose to jointly coordinate the transmit power and the multi-channel allocation to maximize the network throughput performance by fully exploiting multi-channel availability. This coordination enables each node to use high transmission power as long as different orthogonal channels can be assigned to its adjacent nodes. Then, we propose a simple multi-channel media access control (MAC) protocol that allows the nodes on different channels to perform efficient data exchanges without interference in multi-channel networks. We show that the proposed scheme improves the network throughput performance in comparison with other existing schemes.

Highly conductive poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT,:,PSS) attracts a strong attention as a transparent electrode material since it may replace indium tin oxide (ITO) electrodes used in many organic semiconductor devices. However, PEDOT,:,PSS films have been usually deposited using acidic precursors, which caused long term device degradation as well as safety issues during device fabrication processes. This paper firstly reports application of highly conductive PEDOT,:,PSS films deposited on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates using a neutralized precursor to organic bulkhetrojunction solar cells. The sheet resistance ($R_{s}$) of PEDOT,:,PSS was reduced by more than two orders of magnitudes by spin coating the neutralized solution containing 5% of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) and dipping the films in DMSO for 30,min. Subsequently, an approximately 55 nm-thick PEDOT,:,PSS layer was obtained with $R_{s}$ =159 $Omega$/$square$, a conductivity of 1143 S/m, and an optical transmittance of 84%. A solar cell based on poly[4,8-bis[(2-ethylhexyl)oxy]benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b$'$]dithiophene-2,~6-diyl][3-fluoro-2-[(2-ethylhexyl)carbonyl]thieno[3,~4-b]thiophenediyl]: [6,6]-phenyl-C$_{71}$-butyric acid methyl ester fabricated on the PEDOT: PSS/PET substrate exhibited a higher open circuit voltage and power conversion efficiency than did a control solar cell fabricated on an ITO-coated PET substrate. These results suggest that the highly conductive PEDOT,:,PSS films may contribute to realize ITO-free flexible organic solar cells.

Filtering uninteresting data is important to utilize “big data”. Skyline query is popular technique to filter uninteresting data, in which it selects a set of objects that are not dominated by another from a given large database. However, a skyline query often retrieves too many objects to analyze intensively especially for high-dimensional dataset. To solve the problem, k-dominant skyline queries have been introduced. The size of databases sometimes become too large to compute in a centralized environment. Conventional algorithms for computing k-dominant skyline queries are not well suited for parallel and distributed environments, such as the MapReduce framework. In this paper, we consider an efficient parallel algorithm to process k-dominant skyline query in MapReduce framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate the scalability of proposed algorithm for synthetic big datasets under different settings of data distribution, dimensionality, and cardinality.

We investigate the origin of non-ideal transfer characteristics in graphene-based three-branch nano-junction (TBJ) devices. Fabricated graphene TBJs often show asymmetric nonlinear voltage transfer characteristic, although symmetric one should appear ideally. A simple model considering the contact resistances in two input electrodes is deduced and it suggests that the non-ideal characteristic arises from inequality of the metal-graphene contact resistances in the inputs. We fabricate a graphene TBJ device with electrically equal contacts by optimizing the contact formation process and almost ideal nonlinear characteristic was successfully demonstrated.

In this short correspondence, (1+uv)-constacyclic codes over the finite non-chain ring R[v]/(v2+v) are investigated, where R=F2+uF2 with u2=0. Some structural properties of this class of constacyclic codes are studied. Further, some optimal binary linear codes are obtained from these constacyclic codes.

Subcarrier mapping (SCM) is considered to be crucial for capacity-maximization in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) relaying networks and has been investigated extensively. However, no study has examined its exact or approximate close-form analysis under Nakagami-m fading. This paper considers the ordered subcarrier pairing schemes, i.e., worst-to-best (WTB) SCM and best-to-best (BTB) SCM, for the analysis of bit error rate (BER) and capacity of a dual-hop OFDM amplify-and-forward (AF) relay system. The system-analysis is presented for Nakagami-m fading with emphasis on two special cases: one-sided Gaussian fading ($(m=rac{1}{2})$) and Rayleigh fading (m=1). Close-form expressions for the probability density function (PDF) and moment generating function (MGF) of end-to-end SNR are derived while considering fixed gain AF relays. The classical MGF and PDF based approaches are used to compare the BER performance of the system with WTB SCM and BTB SCM schemes. Close-form expressions for the upper bound on ergodic capacity are derived by analyzing Jensen's inequality. Accurate analysis is presented for integer m while the non-integer m values allow the derivations of approximate expressions. The accuracy of the suggested approximation is verified analytically as well as numerically. The simulation results validate the analysis in Nakagami-m fading channel.

Nowadays, computer systems are limited by the power and memory wall. As the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) has dominated the power consumption in modern devices, developing power-saving approaches on DRAM has become more and more important. Among several techniques on different abstract levels, scheduling-based power management policies can be applied to existing memory controllers to reduce power consumption without causing severe performance degradation. Existing power-aware schedulers cluster memory requests into sets, so that the large portion of the DRAM can be switched into the power saving mode; however, only the target addresses are taken into consideration when clustering, while we observe the types (read or write) of requests can play an important role. In this paper, we propose two scheduling-based power management techniques on the DRAM controller: the inter-rank read-write aware clustering approach greatly reduces the active standby power, and the intra-rank read-write aware reordering approach mitigates the performance degradation. The simulation results show that the proposed techniques effectively reduce 75% DRAM power on average. Compared with the existing policy, the power reduction is 10% more on average with comparable or less performance degradation for the proposed techniques.

We propose a quasi-linear trellis-coded modulation (TCM) using nonbinary convolutional codes for quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). First, we study a matched mapping which is able to reduce the computational complexity of the Euclidean distances between signal points of MQAM. As an example, we search for rate R=1/2 convolutional codes for coded 64QAM by this method. The symbol error rates of the proposed codes are estimated by the distance properties theoretically and they are verified by simulation. In addition, we compare the minimum free Euclidean distances of these new codes with their upper bounds. Finally, the bit error probabilitiy of the proposed coded modulation is compared with uncoded signal constellations and a conventional TCM code proposed by Ungerboeck. The result shows the proposed scheme outperform them on the AWGN channels.

We found that the work of Kim et al. [1] on trace representation of the Legendre sequence with the periods p ≡ ±3 (mod 8) can be improved by restricting the selection of the periods p while maintaining the form p ≡ ±3 (mod 8) unchanged. Our method relies on forcing the multiplicative group of residue classes modulo p, Zp*, to take 2 as the least primitive root. On the other hand, by relaxing the very strong condition in the theorem of these authors and by using the product among powers of the primitive root and powers of any quadratic residue element to represent an element in Zp*, we could extend Kim's formula so that it becomes a special case of our formula more general.

This letter presents a method to adaptively counter false data injection attacks (FDIAs) in wireless sensor networks, in which a fuzzy rule-based system detects FDIAs and chooses the most appropriate countermeasures. The method does not require en-route verification processes and manual parameter settings. The effectiveness of the method is shown with simulation results.

This paper focuses on system level simulation of heterogeneous networks (HetNet). Aiming at the imbalance offloading of macro cell and pico cell under the macro-pico coexistence case, we propose an adaptive cell-specific association strategy for HetNet to ensure that users can be served equitably by both macro cell and pico cell. The traditional cell range expansion (CRE) scheme with bias-based cell association has fixed bias values for all pico cells. Our proposal, on the other hand, sets different thresholds of attached users for all MeNB (macro enhanced node B) and PeNBs (pico enhanced node B), and all cell-specific biases are obtained by the proposed adaptive association strategy according to different cell-specific predefined thresholds. With this strategy, the load imbalance between MeNB and different PeNBs is well alleviated, and hence the entire network performance is elevated. Moreover, due to the newly deployed low-power nodes in HetNets, the achieved spectral efficiency of users, especially for cell edge users, is also affected by the downlink inter-cell interference. The idea we put forward is to combine the frequency and power coordination, and so suppress the inter-cell interference. Finally in this paper, we present some numerical results to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

We investigated client honeypots for detecting and circumstantially analyzing drive-by download attacks. A client honeypot requires both improved inspection performance and in-depth analysis for inspecting and discovering malicious websites. However, OS overhead in recent client honeypot operation cannot be ignored when improving honeypot multiplication performance. We propose a client honeypot system that is a combination of multi-OS and multi-process honeypot approaches, and we implemented this system to evaluate its performance. The process sandbox mechanism, a security measure for our multi-process approach, provides a virtually isolated environment for each web browser. It prevents system alteration from a compromised browser process by I/O redirection of file/registry access. To solve the inconsistency problem of file/registry view by I/O redirection, our process sandbox mechanism enables the web browser and corresponding plug-ins to share a virtual system view. Therefore, it enables multiple processes to be run simultaneously without interference behavior of processes on a single OS. In a field trial, we confirmed that the use of our multi-process approach was three or more times faster than that of a single process, and our multi-OS approach linearly improved system performance according to the number of honeypot instances. In addition, our long-term investigation indicated that 72.3% of exploitations target browser-helper processes. If a honeypot restricts all process creation events, it cannot identify an exploitation targeting a browser-helper process. In contrast, our process sandbox mechanism permits the creation of browser-helper processes, so it can identify these types of exploitations without resulting in false negatives. Thus, our proposed system with these multiplication approaches improves performance efficiency and enables in-depth analysis on high interaction systems.

This paper discusses the perspectives of using a wake-up receiver (WUR) in wireless body area network (WBAN) applications with event-driven data transfers. First we compare energy efficiency between the WUR-based and the duty-cycled medium access control protocol -based IEEE 802.15.6 compliant WBAN. Then, we review the architectures of state-of-the-art WURs and discuss their suitability for WBANs. The presented results clearly show that the radio frequency envelope detection based architecture features the lowest power consumption at a cost of sensitivity. The other architectures are capable of providing better sensitivity, but consume more power. Finally, we propose the design modification that enables using a WUR to receive the control commands beside the wake-up signals. The presented results reveal that use of this feature does not require complex modifications of the current architectures, but enables to improve energy efficiency and latency for small data blocks transfers.

The bag-of-words model (BOW) has been extensively adopted by recent human action recognition methods. The pooling operation, which aggregates local descriptor encodings into a single representation, is a key determiner of the performance of the BOW-based methods. However, the spatio-temporal relationship among interest points has rarely been considered in the pooling step, which results in the imprecise representation of human actions. In this paper, we propose a novel pooling strategy named contextual max pooling (CMP) to overcome this limitation. We add a constraint term into the objective function under the framework of max pooling, which forces the weights of interest points to be consistent with their probabilities. In this way, CMP explicitly considers the spatio-temporal contextual relationships among interest points and inherits the positive properties of max pooling. Our method is verified on three challenging datasets (KTH, UCF Sports and UCF Films datasets), and the results demonstrate that our method achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods in human action recognition.

Region of interest (ROI) coding is a useful function for many applications. JPEG2000 supports ROI coding and can decode ROIs preferentially regardless of the shape and number of the regions. However, if the number of regions is quite large, the ROI coding performance of JPEG2000 declines because the code-stream includes many useless non-ROI codes. This paper proposes a wavelet-based ROI coding method suited for multiple ROIs. The proposed wavelet transform does not access any non-ROIs when transforming the ROIs. Additionally, the proposed method eliminates the need for unnecessary coding of the bits in the higher bit planes of non-ROI regions by adding an ROI map to the code-stream. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio than the ROI coding of JPEG2000. The proposed method can be applied to both max-shift and scaling-based ROI coding.

This manuscript presents a simple scheme to improve the performance of a feedback control system that uses power line channels for its feedback loop. The noise and attenuation of power lines, and thus the signal to noise ratio, are known to be cyclostationary. Such cyclic features in the channel allow us to predict virtually error free transmission instants as well as instants of high probability of errors. This paper introduces and evaluates the effectiveness of a packet transmission scheduling that collaborates with a predictive control scheme adapted to this cyclostationary environment. In other words, we explore the cooperation between the physical and application layers of the system in order to achieve an overall optimization. To rate the control quality of the system we evaluate its stability as well as its ability to follow control commands accurately. We compare a scheme of increased packet rate against our proposed scheme which emulates a high packet rate with the use of predictive control. Through this comparison, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme to improve the control quality of the system, even under low signal to noise ratio conditions in the cyclostationary channel.