In the sensor networks for surveillance, the requirements of providing energy efficiency and service differentiation, which is to deliver high-priority packets preferentially, while maintaining high goodput, which is to deliver many packets within their deadline are increasing. However, previous works have difficulties in satisfying the requirements simultaneously. Thus, we propose GES-MAC, which satisfies the requirements simultaneously. GES-MAC reduces idle listening energy consumption by using a duty cycle, periodic listen (i.e., turn on radio module) and sleep (i.e. turn off radio module) of sensor nodes. Cluster-based multi-hop scheduling provides high goodput in a duty-cycled environment by scheduling clusters of nodes in the listen period and opportunistically forwarding data packets in the sleep period. Priority-aware schedule switching makes more high-priority packets reach the sink node by letting high-priority packets preempt the schedules of low-priority packets. In experiments with MICA2 based sensor nodes and in simulations, the energy consumption of the radio module is reduced by 70% compared to the approaches without a duty cycle, while providing 80% 100% goodput of the approaches that provide high goodput. Service differentiation is also supported with little overhead.

In this paper, we propose a novel camera identification method based on photo-response non-uniformity (PRNU), which performs well even with rotated videos. One of the disadvantages of the PRNU-based camera identification methods is that they are very sensitive to de-synchronization. If a video under investigation is slightly rotated, the identification process without synchronization fails. The proposed method solves this kind of out-of-sync problem, by achieving rotation-tolerance using Optimal Tradeoff Circular Harmonic Function (OTCHF) correlation filter. The experimental results show that the proposed method identifies source device with high accuracy from rotated videos.

This paper proposes a simple decentralized cell association method for heterogeneous networks, where low transmission-power pico or femto base stations (BSs) overlay onto a high transmission-power macro BS. The focus of this investigation is on the downlink and the purpose of cell association is to achieve better user fairness, in other words, to increase the minimum average user throughput (worst user throughput). In the proposed method, an appropriate cell association for all users within a cell is achieved in an iterative manner based on the feedback information of each individual user assisted by a small amount of broadcast information from the respective BSs. The proposed method does not require cooperation between BSs. Furthermore, the proposed method is applicable to cases of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) between macro and pico/femto BSs through the use of protected radio resources exclusively used by the pico/femto BSs. Based on numerical results, we show that the proposed method adaptively achieves better cell association for all users according to the user location distributions compared to the conventional cell range expansion (CRE) method. The advantage of the proposed method over CRE is further enhanced in an ICIC scenario.

In cloud computing, multiple users coexist in one datacenter infrastructure and the network is always shared using VMs. Network bandwidth allocation is necessary for security and performance guarantees in the datacenter. InfiniBand (IB) is more widely applied in the construction of datacenter cluster and attracts more interest from the academic field. In this paper, we propose an IB dynamic bandwidth allocation mechanism IBShare to achieve different Weight-proportional and Min-guarantee requirements of allocation entities. The differentiated IB Congestion Control (CC) configuration is proven to offer the proportional throughput characteristic at the flow level. IBShare leverages distributed congestion detection, global congestion computation and configuration to dynamically provide predictable bandwidth division. The real IB experiment results showed IBShare can promptly adapt to the congestion variation and achieve the above two allocation demands through CC reconfiguration. IBShare improved the network utilization than reservation and its computation/configuration overhead was low.

This paper analyzes the conventional unequal erasure protection (UXP) scheme for scalable video transmission, and proposes a dynamic hybrid UXP/ARQ transmission framework to improve the performance of the conventional UXP method for bandwidth-constrained scalable video transmission. This framework applies automatic retransmission request (ARQ) to the conventional UXP scheme for scalable video transmission, and dynamically adjusts the transmission time budget of each group of picture (GOP) according to the feedback about the transmission results of the current and previous GOPs from the receiver. Moreover, the parameter of target video quality is introduced and optimized to adapt to the channel condition in pursuit of more efficient dynamic time allocation. In addition, considering the play-out deadline constraint, the time schedule for the proposed scalable video transmission system is presented. Simulation results show that compared with the conventional UXP scheme and its enhanced method, the average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the reconstructed video can be improved significantly over a wide range of packet loss rates. Besides, the visual quality fluctuation among the GOPs can be reduced for the video which has much movement change.

Nonvolatile flip-flop enables leakage power reduction in logic circuits and quick return from standby mode. However, it has limited write endurance, and its power consumption for writing is larger than that of conventional D flip-flop (DFF). For this reason, it is important to reduce the number of write operations. The write operations can be reduced by stopping the clock signal to synchronous flip-flops because write operations are executed only when the clock is applied to the flip-flops. In such clock gating, a method using Exclusive OR (XOR) of the current value and the new value as the control signal is well known. The XOR based method is effective, but there are several cases where the write operations can be reduced even if the current value and the new value are different. The paper proposes a method to detect such unnecessary write operations based on state transition analysis, and proposes a write control method to save power consumption of nonvolatile flip-flops. In the method, redundant bits are detected to reduce the number of write operations. If the next state and the outputs do not depend on some current bit, the bit is redundant and not necessary to write. The method is based on Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) calculation. We construct write control circuits to stop the clock signal by converting BDDs representing a set of states where write operations are unnecessary. Proposed method can be combined with the XOR based method and reduce the total write operations. We apply combined method to some benchmark circuits and estimate the power consumption with Synopsys NanoSim. On average, 15.0% power consumption can be reduced compared with only the XOR based method.

Corpus-based concatenative speech synthesis has been widely investigated and deployed in recent years since it provides a highly natural synthesized speech quality. The amount of computation required in the run time, however, can often be quite large. In this paper, we propose early stopping schemes for Viterbi beam search in the unit selection, with which we can stop early in the local Viterbi minimization for each unit as well as in the exploration of candidate units for a given target. It takes advantage of the fact that the space of the acoustic parameters of the database units is fixed and certain lower bounds of the concatenation costs can be precomputed. The proposed method for early stopping is admissible in that it does not change the result of the Viterbi beam search. Experiments using probability-based concatenation costs as well as distance-based costs show that the proposed methods of admissible stopping effectively reduce the amount of computation required in the Viterbi beam search while keeping its result unchanged. Furthermore, the reduction effect of computation turned out to be much larger if the available lower bound for concatenation costs is tighter.

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for reporting all intersections among n given segments in the plane using work space of arbitrarily given size. More exactly, given a parameter s which is between Ω(1) and O(n) specifying the size of work space, the algorithm reports all the segment intersections in roughly O(n2/+ K) time using O(s) words of O(log n) bits, where K is the total number of intersecting pairs. The time complexity can be improved to O((n2/s) log s + K) when input segments have only some number of different slopes.

Pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) is a new type of artificial neural network specific for image processing applications. It is a single layer, two dimensional network with neurons which have 1:1 correspondence to the pixels of an input image. It is convenient to process the intensities and spatial locations of image pixels simultaneously by applying a PCNN. Therefore, we propose a modified PCNN with anisotropic synaptic weight matrix for image edge detection from the aspect of intensity similarities of pixels to their neighborhoods. By applying the anisotropic synaptic weight matrix, the interconnections are only established between the central neuron and the neighboring neurons corresponding to pixels with similar intensity values in a 3 by 3 neighborhood. Neurons corresponding to edge pixels and non-edge pixels will receive different input signal from the neighboring neurons. By setting appropriate threshold conditions, image step edges can be detected effectively. Comparing with conventional PCNN based edge detection methods, the proposed modified PCNN is much easier to control, and the optimal result can be achieved instantly after all neurons pulsed. Furthermore, the proposed method is shown to be able to distinguish the isolated pixels from step edge pixels better than derivative edge detectors.

Dichotomous coordinate descent (DCD) iterations method has been proposed for adaptive feedback cancellation, which uses a fixed number of iterations and a fixed amplitude range. In this paper, improved DCD algorithms are proposed, which substitute the constant number of iterations and the amplitude range with a variable number of iterations(VI) and/or a variable amplitude range(VA). Thus VI-DCD, VA-DCD and VIA-DCD algorithms are obtained. Computer simulations are used to compare the performance of the proposed algorithms against original DCD algorithm, and simulation results demonstrate that significant improvements are achieved in the convergence speed and accuracy. Another notable conclusion by further simulations is that the proposed algorithms achieve superior performance with a real speech segment as the input.

In order to support the increasing amount of mobile data traffic, Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is actively discusses cell range expansion (CRE) and time domain multiplexing – inter-cell interference coordination (TDM-ICIC). They have shown to be attractive techniques for heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployment where pico base stations (BSs) overlay macro BSs. There are two control schemes of the TDM-ICIC. One, named ZP-scheme, stops radio resource assignments for data traffic in predetermined radio resources in the time domain (subframes). The other, named RP-scheme, maintains the resource assignment whereas it reduces the transmission power at macro BSs at predetermined subframes. In this paper, we clarify the effective ranges of both ZP-scheme and RP-scheme by conducting the system level simulations. Moreover, the appropriate power reduction value at predetermined subframes is also clarified from the difference in the effective range of various power reduction values. The comprehensive evaluation results show that both ZP-scheme and RP-scheme are not effective when the CRE bias value is 0 dB or less. If the CRE bias value is larger than 0 dB, they are effective when the ratio of predetermined subframes in all subframes is set to appropriate values. These values depend on the CRE bias value and power reduction in the predetermined subframes. The effective range is expanded when the power reduction in the predetermined subframes changes with the CRE bias value. Therefore, the effective range of RP-scheme is larger than that of ZP-scheme by setting an appropriate power reduction in the predetermined subframes.

Cell Range Expansion (CRE) is a promising technique for the enhancement of traffic offload to pico cells. CRE is realized by adjusting the trigger timing of handover (HO) toward/from pico cells. However, inappropriate setting of trigger timing results in HO failures or Ping-Pong HOs. Both the HO failures and the Ping-Pong HOs degrade the continuity of user data services. Therefore, when CRE is applied, both the HO failures and the Ping-Pong HOs should be kept suppressed in order to guarantee the continuity of services for users. However, in the conventional studies, the application of CRE is discussed without consideration of HO performance. This paper clarifies the application range of CRE from the perspective of HO performance by taking the HO failure rates and the Ping-Pong HO rates as HO performance measures. As an example, we reveal that there is an appropriate CRE bias values which keep both the HO failure rate and Ping-Pong HO rate less than 1%. Such an appropriate CRE bias value range is smaller than the one without consideration of HO performance, which is reported in the conventional studies. The authors also observed that Ping-Pong HO occurs due to the short staying time of users at pico cells in high velocity environment. The rate of such Ping-Pong HOs becomes more than about 1% when the user velocity is more than 60 km/h. Therefore, it is more difficult in high velocity environment than that in low velocity environment to find appropriate CRE bias values.

This paper evaluates the downlink performance of an LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) heterogeneous network that uses carrier aggregation (CA) between macro and small cells. The concept of utilizing the CA functionalities in LTE-A is effective in increasing the network capacity in a congested area through raising of the base station density using small cells overlaid onto an existing macro cell network. This concept is also effective in maintaining the mobility performance of user equipment (UE) because handover operation is not applied when entering/leaving a small cell, but component carrier addition/removal is only performed through CA while maintaining the connection to a macro cell. In order to present comprehensive performance evaluations in an LTE-A heterogeneous network with CA, this paper evaluates various performance criteria, e.g., downlink cell throughput and downlink user throughput. According to the obtained simulation results, the total downlink cell throughput achieved in an LTE-A heterogeneous network deployment with CA (four small cells overlaid onto a macro cell sector) exhibits a 3.9-fold improvement compared to a conventional-macro-cell-only network deployment using two frequency bands.

In Long-Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, heterogeneous networks are important to further improve the system throughput per unit area. In heterogeneous network deployment, low power nodes such as picocells are overlaid onto macrocells. In the downlink, the combined usage of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC), which is a technique that reduces the severe interference from macrocells by reducing the transmission power or stopping the transmission from the macrocells, and cell range expansion (CRE), which is a technique that expands the cell radius of picocells by biasing the received signal power, is very effective in improving the system and cell-edge user throughput. In this paper, we consider two types of ICIC. The first one reduces the transmission power from the macrocells (referred to as reduced power ICIC) and the second one stops the transmission from the macrocells (referred to as zero power ICIC). This paper investigates the impact of the reduction in the transmission power when using reduced power ICIC and the restriction on the modulation scheme caused by the reduction in the transmission power when using reduced power ICIC on the user throughput performance with the CRE offset value as a parameter. In addition, the throughput performance when applying reduced power ICIC is compared to that when applying zero power ICIC. Simulation results show that the user throughput with reduced power ICIC is not sensitive to the protected subframe ratio compared to that with zero power ICIC even if the modulation scheme is restricted to only QPSK in the protected subframes. This indicates that reduced power ICIC is more robust than zero power ICIC for non-optimum protected subframe ratios.

In this paper, we consider a multi-cell cognitive radio network (CRN), which overlays a multi-cell primary network. To manage the coexistence, a primary-willingness based coexistent architecture and a novel intra-cell spectrum overlay and inter-cell spectrum underlay sharing method are proposed. In the system, primary base stations will broadcast pilot signals and interference margins to assist the CRN for interference channel evaluation and power control. Subject to the interference margins imposed by the primary network, we define a utility (payoff) function that can represent the secondary system performance while taking into account the co-channel interference among secondary cells. A distributed resource allocation scheme is devised to guarantee the primary performance, and at the same time, maximize the secondary utility without any cooperation among cognitive base stations (CBS). Quality of Service among users is also considered by the scheme such that the instantaneous data rate for each secondary user is larger than a given minimum rate. The resource allocation problem can be decomposed into two subproblems: subchannel allocation and distributed power allocation game (DPAG). We prove that there exists a Nash equilibrium in the DPAG and the equilibrium is unique. Moreover, the DPAG is also Pareto optimal in some constrained environments, that is, no CBS can further improve its performance without impairing others. The proposed algorithm turns out to converge to an equilibrium within a small number of iterations.

One major challenge to implement orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems over doubly selective channels is the non-negligible intercarrier interference (ICI), which significantly degrades the system performance. Existing solutions to cope with ICI include zero-forcing (ZF), minimum mean square error (MMSE) and other linear or nonlinear equalization methods. However, these schemes fail to achieve a satisfactory tradeoff between performance and computational complexity. To address this problem, in this paper we propose two novel nonlinear ICI cancellation techniques, which are referred to as parallel interference cancelation (PIC) and hybrid interference cancelation (HIC). Taking advantage of the special structure of basis expansion model (BEM) based channel matrices, our proposed schemes enjoy low computational complexity and are capable of cancelling ICI effectively. Moreover, since the proposed schemes can flexibly select different basis functions and be independent of the channel statistics, they are applicable to practical OFDM based systems such as DVB-T2 over doubly selective channels. Theoretical analysis and simulation results both confirm their performance-complexity advantages in comparison with some existing methods.

Super resolution (SR) reconstruction is the process of fusing a sequence of low-resolution images into one high-resolution image. Many researchers have introduced various SR reconstruction methods. However, these traditional methods are limited in the extent to which they allow recovery of high-frequency information. Moreover, due to the self-similarity of face images, most of the facial SR algorithms are machine learning based. In this paper, we introduce a facial SR algorithm that combines learning-based and regularized SR image reconstruction algorithms. Our conception involves two main ideas. First, we employ separated frequency components to reconstruct high-resolution images. In addition, we separate the region of the training face image. These approaches can help to recover high-frequency information. In our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these ideas.

We have seen a rapid increase in mobile data traffic in cellular networks, especially in densely populated areas called “hotspots.” In order to deal with this trend, heterogeneous networks (HetNet) are attracting much attention as a method of effectively accommodating such traffic increases using the Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced system in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This paper first presents an overview of HetNet, where various wireless nodes can be deployed over the coverage area formed by macro base stations (BSs). Next, various evaluation results are provided for HetNet, where pico BSs (“Pico-BSs”) are deployed over the coverage area of macro BSs (“Macro-BSs”). Then, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis, not only of the effect of overlaying Pico-BSs but also a detailed analyses of the techniques called “cell range expansion (CRE)” and “enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC)” for facilitating the offloading of user terminals (UEs) from Macro-BSs to Pico-BSs and mitigating interference, respectively, for both downlink and uplink. Noteworthy outcomes found through the comprehensive study are that CRE provides throughput improvements for uplinks, especially for UE connected to Pico-BSs. In addition, this paper demonstrates that CRE contributes to improving downlink throughput especially for low traffic loads. The outcome regarding eICIC is that eICIC provides improvements in total throughput, in spite of the fact that eICIC causes unfairness between UE connected to the Pico-BSs and those with Macro-BSs.

We consider the problem of detecting and localizing of link quality degradations in transparent wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks. In particular, we consider the degradation of the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR), which is a key parameter for link quality monitoring in WDM networks. With transparency in WDM networks, transmission lightpaths can bypass electronic processing at intermediate nodes. Accordingly, links cannot always be monitored by receivers at their end nodes. This paper proposes the use of optical multicast probes to monitor OSNR degradations on optical links. The proposed monitoring scheme consists of two steps. The first step is an off-line process to set up monitoring trees using integer linear programming (ILP). The set of monitoring trees is selected to guarantee that significant OSNR degradations can be identified on any link or links in the network. The second step uses optical performance monitors that are placed at the receivers identified in the first step. The information from these monitors is collected and input to the estimation algorithm to localize the degraded links. Numerical results indicate that the proposed monitoring algorithm is able to detect link degradations that cause significant OSNR changes. In addition, we demonstrate how the information obtained from monitoring can be used to detect a significant end-to-end OSNR degradation even though there is no significant OSNR degradation on individual links.

In order to evaluate the goodness of frequency hopping (FH) sequence design, the periodic Hamming correlation function is used as an important measure. But aperiodic Hamming correlation of FH sequences matters in real applications, while it received little attraction in the literature compared with periodic Hamming correlation. In this paper, the new aperiodic Hamming correlation lower bounds for FH sequences, with respect to the size of the frequency slot set, the sequence length, the family size, the maximum aperiodic Hamming autocorrelation and the maximum aperiodic Hamming crosscorrelation are established. The new aperiodic bounds are tighter than the Peng-Fan bounds. In addition, the new bounds include the second powers of the maximum aperiodic Hamming autocorrelation and the maximum aperiodic Hamming crosscorrelation but the Peng-Fan bounds do not include them. For the given sequence length, the family size and the frequency slot set size, the values of the maximum aperiodic Hamming autocorrelation and the maximum aperiodic Hamming crosscorrelation are inside of an ellipse which is given by the new aperiodic bounds.