To design a wireless sensor network for farms, it is necessary to understand and predict the effect of vegetation. In this study, the change in the propagation loss characteristics in 920-MHz band is examined during the growth of mulberry bushes. The received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is measured as a function of the distance between the transmitting antenna (Tx) and the receiving antenna (Rx) in a 50×50m mulberry field. The Tx and Rx are placed at a height of 1.5m. Moreover, the horizontal and vertical polarizations are measured and the differences are shown. Three empirical vegetation attenuation models are introduced, and the measured data have been fitted to each model. The results show that the non-zero gradient model is the best model at predicting the vegetation attenuation in a mulberry farm regardless of the polarization or mulberry growth. It is found that the attenuation dependence on the plant height is linear. Furthermore, the results have revealed that the horizontal polarization had about 1.5 times as large an effect on the vegetation attenuation as the vertical polarization.

This paper proposes a novel cooperative scheme combining distributed space-time block code (STBC) at physical layer, multiple access protocol at medium access control (MAC) layer and opportunistic routing without complicated routing algorithm for achieving high reliability for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. The proposed scheme can reduce interference and collision, and achieve reducing redundant broadcast of safety-related messages for multi-hop vehicular communications on highway. In particular, we propose a novel algorithm of relay selection based-on position, speed and direction of movement to select intermediate vehicle stations (VS) with high contribution according to the transmission direction. Furthermore, in order to reduce interference and collision, we install a new timer to select a master relay vehicle station (MVS) which manages a packet transmission of whole network to trigger and synchronize transmitting timing of relay VSs (RVSs) in each hop. From the results of simulations, we can confirm that the proposed method can achieve reducing the redundant broadcast safety-related messages with keeping the packet loss probability by limiting the retransmission at each VS.

Time synchronization is of paramount importance in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to the inherent distributed characteristics of WSNs. Border surveillance WSNs, especially, require a highly secure and accurate time synchronization scheme to detect and track intruders. In this paper, we propose a Secure and Efficient Time synchronization scheme for Border surveillance WSNs (SETB) which meets the requirements of border surveillance WSNs while minimizing the resource usage. To accomplish this goal, we first define the performance and security requirements for time synchronization in border surveillance WSNs in detail. Then, we build our time synchronization scheme optimized for these requirements. By utilizing both heterogeneous WSNs and one-way key chains, SETB satisfies the requirements with much less overhead than existing schemes. Additionally, we introduce on-demand time synchronization, which implies that time synchronization is conducted only when an intruder enters the WSN, in order to reduce energy consumption. Finally, we propose a method of deploying time-source nodes to keep the synchronization error within the requirement. Our analysis shows that SETB not only satisfies the performance and security requirements, but also is highly efficient in terms of communication and computation overhead, thus minimizing energy consumption.

Determination of wordlength is essential for designing digital circuits because the wordlength affects system performance, hardware size, and power consumption. Variable wordlength methods that a system dynamically and effectively changes the wordlength depending on surrounding environments have been studied for power reduction in wireless systems. The conventional variable wordlength methods induce communication performance degradation when compared with a floating-point representation in time-varying fading channels. This paper discusses rapid wordlength control on packet basis and proposes a new method based on monitoring subcarrier SNRs in an OFDM receiver. The proposed method can estimate signal quality accurately and can decrease the wordlength decision errors. The simulation results have indicated that the proposed method shows better PER performance compared with the conventional methods.

Autonomous driving is not only required to detect pedestrians around vehicles, but also expected to understand the behaviors of pedestrians. Pedestrian body orientation and head orientation are the relevant indicators of the pedestrian intention. This paper proposes an accurate estimation system to recognize the pedestrian body orientation and the pedestrian head orientation from on-board camera and inertial sensors. The proposed system discretizes the body orientation and the head orientation into 16 directions. In order to achieve the accurate orientation estimation, a novel training database is established, which includes strongly labeled data and weakly labeled data. Semi-Supervised Learning method is employed to annotate the weakly labeled data, and to generate the accurate classifier based on the proposed training database. In addition, the temporal constraint and the human physical model constraint are considered in orientation estimation, which are beneficial to the reasonable and stable result of orientation estimation for the pedestrian in image sequences. This estimated result is the orientation in camera space. The comprehension of the pedestrian behavior needs to be conducted in the real world space. Therefore, this paper proposes to model the motion of the host vehicle using inertial sensor, then transforms the estimated orientation from camera space to the real world space by considering the vehicle and pedestrian motion. The represented orientation indicates the behavior of the pedestrian more directly. Finally, a series of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed pedestrian orientation system.

This paper proposes Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based orthogonal beam selection method at the user terminals (UTs) to reduce the number of nulls for the other users except an intended user by the Block Diagonalization (BD) algorithm in multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) sytems. The BD algorithm has been proposed in order to realize MU-MIMO broadcast transmission with a realistic signal processing burden. The BD algorithm cancels inter-user interference by creating the weights so that the channel matrixes for the other users are set to be zero matrixes. However, when the number of transmit antennas is equals to the total number of received antennas, the transmission rate by the BD algorithm is decreased. The proposed method realizes the performance improvement compared to the conventional BD algorithm without the burden on the UTs. It is verified via bit error rate (BER) evaluation that the proposed method is effective compared to the conventional BD algorithm and antenna selection method. Moreover, the effectiveness of proposed method is verified by the performance evaluation considering medium access control (MAC) layer in a comparison with the conventional BD algorithm which needs the channel state information (CSI) feedback. Because the proposed method can be easily applied to beamforming without the CSI feedback (implicit beamforming), it is shown that the propose method is effective from a point of view on the transmission efficiency in MU-MIMO system.

In 2000, Dimitrov, Jullien, and Miller proposed an efficient and simple double-exponentiation algorithm based on a signed-digit recoding algorithm. The average joint Hamming ratio (AJHR) was reduced from 0.556 to 0.534 by using the recoding algorithm. In this paper, the DJM recoding algorithm was extended to three types: the 3-digit sliding window, the 1-digit right-to-left sliding window, and the 1-digit left-to-right sliding window. The average joint Hamming ratios of the three cases were 0.521, 0.515, and 0.511, respectively.

We herein describe an autonomous peer discovery scheme for Device-to-Device (D2D) communications. With the increasing popularity of D2D communications, an efficient means of finding the neighboring node, i.e., peer discovery, is required. To this end, we propose a new autonomous peer discovery scheme that uses azimuth spread (AS), delay spread (DS), and shadow fading of the uplink pilot from each mobile station (MS). Given that AS, DS, and shadow fading are spatially correlated, nodes that have similar values must be neighbors. The proposed scheme filters out the MSs that are unlikely to be neighbors and uses the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test to improve the accuracy of neighbor discovery. Unlike previous peer discovery schemes that incur additional signaling overheads, our proposal finds neighboring nodes by using the existing uplink pilot transmission from MSs such that neighboring peers can be found autonomously. Through analysis and simulation, we show that neighboring MSs can be found accurately with low latency.

Incoming GPS signals through windows can be often observed indoors. However, conventional indoor positioning systems do not use Global Positioning System (GPS) generally because the signals may come in NLOS (Non Line of Sight). In this paper, we propose a positioning method by fingerprinting based on the incoming GPS signals.

Reversible data hiding is a technique in which hidden data are embedded in host data such that the consistency of the host is perfectly preserved and its data are restored during extraction of the hidden data. In this paper, a linear prediction technique for reversible data hiding of audio waveforms is improved. The proposed variable expansion method is able to control the payload size through varying the expansion factor. The proposed technique is combined with the prediction error expansion method. Reversible embedding, perfect payload detection, and perfect recovery of the host signal are achieved for a framed audio signal. A smaller expansion factor results in a smaller payload size and less degradation in the stego audio quality. Computer simulations reveal that embedding a random-bit payload of less than 0.4 bits per sample into CD-format music signals provide stego audio with acceptable objective quality. The method is also applied to G.711 µ-law-coded speech signals. Computer simulations reveal that embedding a random-bit payload of less than 0.1 bits per sample into speech signals provide stego speech with good objective quality.

This paper proposes a method of watermarking for digital audio signals based on adaptive phase modulation. Audio signals are usually non-stationary, i.e., their own characteristics are time-variant. The features for watermarking are usually not selected by combining the principle of variability, which affects the performance of the whole watermarking system. The proposed method embeds a watermark into an audio signal by adaptively modulating its phase with the watermark using IIR all-pass filters. The frequency location of the pole-zero of an IIR all-pass filter that characterizes the transfer function of the filter is adapted on the basis of signal power distribution on sub-bands in a magnitude spectrum domain. The pole-zero locations are adapted so that the phase modulation produces slight distortion in watermarked signals to achieve the best sound quality. The experimental results show that the proposed method could embed inaudible watermarks into various kinds of audio signals and correctly detect watermarks without the aid of original signals. A reasonable trade-off between inaudibility and robustness could be obtained by balancing the phase modulation scheme. The proposed method can embed a watermark into audio signals up to 100 bits per second with 99% accuracy and 6 bits per second with 94.3% accuracy in the cases of no attack and attacks, respectively.

Cold boot attack is a side channel attack that recovers data from memory, which persists for a short period after power is lost. In the course of this attack, the memory gradually degrades over time and only a corrupted version of the data may be available to the attacker. Recently, great efforts have been made to reconstruct the original data from a corrupted version of AES key schedules, based on the assumption that all bits in the charged states tend to decay to the ground states while no bit in the ground state ever inverts. However, in practice, there is a small number of bits flipping in the opposite direction, called reverse flipping errors. In this paper, motivated by the latest work that formulates the relations of AES key bits as a Boolean Satisfiability problem, we move one step further by taking the reverse flipping errors into consideration and employing off-the-shelf SAT and MaxSAT solvers to accomplish the recovery of AES-128 key schedules from decayed memory images. Experimental results show that, in the presence of reverse flipping errors, the MaxSAT approach enables reliable recovery of key schedules with significantly less time, compared with the SAT approach that relies on brute force search to find out the target errors. Moreover, in order to further enhance the efficiency of key recovery, we simplify the original problem by removing variables and formulas that have relatively weak relations to the whole key schedule. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved MaxSAT approach reduces the scale of the problem and recover AES key schedules more efficiently when the decay factor is relatively large.

A simplified circuit has been utilized for fast computation of the current flowing in the cross-point memory array. However, the circuit has a constraint in that the selected cell is located farthest from current drivers so as to estimate the current degraded by metal wire resistance. This is because the length of the current path along the metal wire varies with the selected address in the cross-point memory array. In this paper, a new simplified circuit is proposed for calculating the current at every address in order to take account of the metal wire resistance. By employing the Monte Carlo simulation to solve the proposed simplified circuit, the current distribution across the array is obtained, so that failure rates of read disturbance and write error are estimated precisely. By comparing the conventional and the proposed simplified circuits, it was found that the conventional simplified circuit estimated optimistic failure rates for read disturbance and for write error when the wire resistance was prominent enough as a parasitic resistance.

It has been reported that a left-handed waveguide can be constituted using cutoff TE10 mode of rectangular waveguide. Because the cutoff TE10 mode shows effectively negative permittivity, the left-handed mode propagates by adding series capacitance in the form of short- or open-stubs. This paper suggests a constitution method of left-handed waveguides using cutoff TM mode. In this case, the cutoff TM mode shows effectively negative permeability. Therefore, a left-handed waveguide can be constituted by adding parallel inductance. In this paper, two types of the left-handed waveguides are designed using circular TM01 mode and rectangular TM11 mode, and the dispersion characteristics are numerically investigated. The validity of the constituting principle is confirmed by an experiment.

A high frequency approximation method is proposed to obtain the scattering from rectangular dielectric cuboids. Our formulation is based on a Kirchhoff type aperture integration of the equivalent current sources over the surface of the scattering bodies. The derived formulae have been used to get the radar cross section of cuboids, and the results are compared with those by other methods, such as physical optics, geometrical theory of diffraction, the HFSS simulation and measurements. Good agreement has been observed to confirm the validity of our method.

This paper deals with the security of chaos-based “true” random number generators (RNG)s. An attack method is proposed to analyze the security weaknesses of chaos-based RNGs and its convergence is proved using a master slave synchronization scheme. Attack on a RNG based on a double-scroll attractor is also presented as an example. All secret parameters of the RNG are revealed where the only information available is the structure of the RNG and a scalar time series observed from the double-scroll attractor. Simulation and numerical results of the proposed attack method are given such that the RNG doesn't fulfill NIST-800-22 statistical test suite, not only the next bit but also the same output bit stream of the RNG can be reproduced.

Currently there is not any prospect of realizing quantum computers which can compute prime factorization, which RSA relies on, or discrete logarithms, which ElGamal relies on, of practical size. Additionally the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) is requiring practical public key cryptosystems which do not use exponential operation. Therefore we constituted a cryptosystem relying on the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers, based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem, fully exploiting another strength of MPKC that exponential operation is not necessary. We evaluated its security by performing the Gröbner base attacks with workstations and consequently concluded that it requires computation complexity no less than entirely random quadratic polynomials. Additionally we showed that it is secure against rank attacks since the polynomials of central map are all full rank, assuming the environment of conventional computers.

There is a strong push towards the ultra-realistic presentation of multimedia contents made possible by the latest advances in computational and signal processing technologies. Three-dimensional sound presentation is necessary to convey a natural and rich multimedia experience. Promising ways to achieve this include the sound field reproduction technique known as high-order Ambisonics (HOA). While these advanced methods are now within the capabilities of consumer-level processing systems, their adoption is hindered by the lack of contents. Production and coding of the audio components in multimedia focus on traditional formats such as stereophonic sound. Mainstream audio codecs and media such as CDs or DVDs do not support advanced, rich contents such as HOA encodings. To ameliorate this problem and speed up the adoption of spatial sound technologies, this paper proposes a novel way to downmix HOA contents into a stereo signal. The resulting data can be distributed using conventional methods such as audio CDs or as the audio component of an internet video stream. The results can be listened to using legacy stereo reproduction systems. However, they include spatial information encoded as the inter-channel level and phase differences. The proposed method consists of a downmixing filterbank which independently modulate inter-channel differences at each frequency bin. The proposal is evaluated using simple test signals and found to outperform conventional methods such as matrix-encoded surround and the Ambisonics UHJ format in terms of spatial resolution. The proposal can be coupled with a previously presented method to recover HOA signals from stereo recordings. The resulting system allows for the preservation of full-surround spatial information in ultra-realistic contents when they are transferred using a stereo stream. Simulation results show that a compatible decoder can accurately recover up to five HOA channels from a stereo signal (2nd order HOA data in the horizontal plane).

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is one of the most popular tools for speech enhancement. In this letter, we present an improved semi-supervised NMF (ISNMF)-based speech enhancement algorithm combining techniques of noise estimation and Incremental NMF (INMF). In this approach, fixed speech bases are obtained from training samples offline in advance while noise bases are trained on-the-fly whenever new noisy frame arrives. The INMF algorithm is adopted for noise bases learning because it can overcome the difficulties that conventional NMF confronts in online processing. The proposed algorithm is real-time capable in the sense that it processes the time frames of the noisy speech one by one and the computational complexity is feasible. Four different objective evaluation measures at various signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over traditional semi-supervised NMF (SNMF) and well-known robust principal component analysis (RPCA) algorithm.

Recently, wearable wireless devices or terminals have become hot a topic not only in research but also in business. Implantable wireless devices can temporarily be utilized to monitor a patient's condition in an emergency situation or to identify people in highly secured places. Unlike conventional wireless devices, wearable or implantable devices are used on or in the human body. In this sense, body-centric wireless communications (BCWCs) have become a very active area of research. Radio-frequency or microwave medical devices used for cancer treatment systems and surgical operation have completely different functions, but they are used on or in the human body. In terms of research techniques, such medical devices have a lot of similarities to BCWCs. The antennas to be used in the vicinity of the human body should be safe, small and robust. Also, their interaction with the human body should be well considered. This review paper describes some of the wearable antennas as well as implantable antennas that have been studied in our laboratory.