The authors have proposed Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO)-Constant Envelope Modulation, (MIMO-CEM), as a power and complexity efficient alternative to MIMO-OFDM, suitable for wireless backhaul networks in which relay nodes are fixed in their positions. One of the major problems hindering the real application of MIMO-CEM is to estimate MIMO channel characteristics. MIMO-CEM is based upon two contrary schemes; one is nonlinear equalization such as maximum likelihood sequence estimator, which needs accurate channel information to replicate the received signal passing through it. The other is a low resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC), e.g., 1-bit in the default operation that removes the received signal amplitude fluctuation. In this paper, as a solution to the channel estimation problem in MIMO-CEM with low resolution ADC receiver, we propose an adaptive MIMO-CEM channel estimation scheme where iterative adaptive channel estimation is carried out to minimize the error between the received preamble signal and the replicated one. We also prove that Code Division Multiplexing (CDM) preamble transmission is effective in estimating MIMO channel parameters in the presence of large quantization noise. Computer simulation results show that MIMO-CEM with the proposed channel estimator using CDM preambles achieves identical BER performance to that with the ideal channel estimation even in presence of severe quantization noise caused by a low resolution ADC.

In this paper, we propose an effective mutation operators for Cooperative Genetic Algorithm (CGA) to be applied to a practical Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP). The nurse scheduling is a very difficult task, because NSP is a complex combinatorial optimizing problem for which many requirements must be considered. In real hospitals, the schedule changes frequently. The changes of the shift schedule yields various problems, for example, a fall in the nursing level. We describe a technique of the reoptimization of the nurse schedule in response to a change. The conventional CGA is superior in ability for local search by means of its crossover operator, but often stagnates at the unfavorable situation because it is inferior to ability for global search. When the optimization stagnates for long generation cycle, a searching point, population in this case, would be caught in a wide local minimum area. To escape such local minimum area, small change in a population should be required. Based on such consideration, we propose a mutation operator activated depending on the optimization speed. When the optimization stagnates, in other words, when the optimization speed decreases, the mutation yields small changes in the population. Then the population is able to escape from a local minimum area by means of the mutation. However, this mutation operator requires two well-defined parameters. This means that user have to consider the value of these parameters carefully. To solve this problem, we propose a periodic mutation operator which has only one parameter to define itself. This simplified mutation operator is effective over a wide range of the parameter value.

A time-reversal (TR) approach with multiple signal classification (MUSIC) provides super-resolution for detection and localization using multistatic data collected from an array antenna system. The theory of TR-MUSIC assumes that the number of antenna elements is greater than that of scatterers (targets). Furthermore, it requires many sets of frequency-domain data (snapshots) in seriously noisy environments. Unfortunately, these conditions are not practical for real environments due to the restriction of a reasonable antenna structure as well as limited measurement time. We propose an approach that treats both noise reduction and relaxation of the transceiver restriction by using a time-domain gating technique accompanied with the Fourier transform before applying the TR-MUSIC imaging algorithm. Instead of utilizing the conventional multistatic data matrix (MDM), we employ a modified MDM obtained from the gating technique. The resulting imaging functions yield more reliable images with only a few snapshots regardless of the limitation of the antenna arrays.

This paper describes latest RF Automated Test Equipment (RF ATE) technologies that include device under test (DUT) connections, a calibration method, and an RF test module mainly focusing on low cost of test (COT). Most important respect for low COT is how achieve a number of simultaneous measurements and short test time as well as a plain calibration. We realized these respects by a newly proposed calibration method and a drastically downsized RF test module with multiple resources and high throughput. The calibration method is very convenient for RF ATE. Major contribution for downsizing of the RF test module is RF circuit technology in form of RF functional system in package (RF-SIPs), resulting in very attractive test solutions.

In this paper, an improved GPS/RFID integration method based on Sequential Iterated Reduced Sigma Point Kalman Filter (SIRSPKF) is proposed for vehicle navigation applications. It is applied to improve the accuracy, reliability and availability of satellite positioning in the areas where the satellite visibility is limited. An RFID system is employed to assist the GPS system in achieving high accuracy positioning. Further, to reduce the measurement noise and decrease the computational complexity caused by the integrated GPS/RFID, SIRSPKF is investigated as the dominant filter for the proposed integration. Performances and computational complexities of different integration scenarios with different filters are compared in this paper. A field experiment shows that both accuracy and availability of positioning can be improved significantly by this low-cost GPS/RFID integration method with the reduced computational load.

More and more mobile devices adopt multi-battery and dynamic voltage scaling policy (DVS) to reduce the energy consumption and extend the battery runtime. However, since the nonlinear characteristics of the multi-battery are not considered, the practical efficiency is not good enough. In order to reduce the energy consumption and extend the battery runtime, this paper proposes an approach based on the battery characteristics to implement the co-optimization of the multi-battery scheduling and dynamic voltage scaling on multi-battery powered systems. In this work, considering the nonlinear discharging characteristics of the existing batteries, we use the Markov process to depict the multi-battery discharging behavior, and build a multi-objective optimal model to denote the energy consumption and battery states, then propose a binary tree based algorithm to solve this model. By means of this method, we get an optimal and applicable scheme about multi-battery scheduling and dynamic voltage scaling. Experimental results show that this approach achieves an average improvement in battery runtime of 17.5% over the current methods in physical implementation.

As anonymity increasingly becomes a necessary and legitimate aim in many applications, a number of anonymous authentication schemes have been suggested over the years. Among the many schemes is Lee and Kwon's password-based authentication scheme for wireless environments. Compared with previous schemes, Lee and Kwon's scheme not only improves anonymity by employing random temporary IDs but also provides user-friendliness by allowing human-memorable passwords. In this letter, we point out that Lee and Kwon's scheme, despite its many merits, is vulnerable to off-line password guessing attacks and a forgery attack. In addition, we show how to eliminate these vulnerabilities.

In this paper, a fast and automated method of counting pedestrians in crowded areas is proposed along with three contributions. We firstly propose Local Empirical Templates (LET), which are able to outline the foregrounds, typically made by single pedestrians in a scene. LET are extracted by clustering foregrounds of single pedestrians with similar features in silhouettes. This process is done automatically for unknown scenes. Secondly, comparing the size of group foreground made by a group of pedestrians to that of appropriate LET captured in the same image patch with the group foreground produces the density ratio. Because of the local scale normalization between sizes, the density ratio appears to have a bound closely related to the number of pedestrians who induce the group foreground. Finally, to extract the bounds of density ratios for groups of different number of pedestrians, we propose a 3D human models based simulation in which camera viewpoints and pedestrians' proximity are easily manipulated. We collect hundreds of typical occluded-people patterns with distinct degrees of human proximity and under a variety of camera viewpoints. Distributions of density ratios with respect to the number of pedestrians are built based on the computed density ratios of these patterns for extracting density ratio bounds. The simulation is performed in the offline learning phase to extract the bounds from the distributions, which are used to count pedestrians in online settings. We reveal that the bounds seem to be invariant to camera viewpoints and humans' proximity. The performance of our proposed method is evaluated with our collected videos and PETS 2009's datasets. For our collected videos with the resolution of 320 × 240, our method runs in real-time with good accuracy and frame rate of around 30 fps, and consumes a small amount of computing resources. For PETS 2009's datasets, our proposed method achieves competitive results with other methods tested on the same datasets [1],[2].

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a popular air interface technology that is adopted as a standard modulation scheme for 4G communication systems owing to its excellent spectral efficiency. For OFDM systems, synchronization problems have received much attention along with peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction. In addition to frequency offset estimation, frame synchronization is a challenging problem that must be solved to achieve optimal system performance. In this paper, we present a maximum likelihood (ML) frame synchronizer for OFDM systems. The synchronizer exploits a synchronization word and cyclic prefixes together to improve the synchronization performance. Numerical results show that the performance of the proposed frame synchronizer is better than that of conventional schemes. The proposed synchronizer can be used as a reference for evaluating the performance of other suboptimal frame synchronizers. We also modify the proposed frame synchronizer to reduce the implementation complexity and propose a near-ML synchronizer for time-varying fading channels.

Some optical components have polarization dependent loss (PDL), which degrades the performance of optical measurement systems. Various PDL suppression methods have been proposd, most of them have rather complicated structures. In this paper we propose a new simple method for PDL suppression, in which a single birefringent element is concatenated to a PDL device with their birefringent axes offset by π/4. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments, that is, polarization dependent loss variation amplitude V of a device relative to its average loss is reduced from 90% to 2% by using a 2 m long PANDA fiber for an LED light source whose central wavelength λ0 and spectral width Δλ are 847 nm and 55 nm, respectively. Furthermore, for an SLD light source with λ0=1539 nm and Δλ=71 nm, V as much as 80% is reduced to 2% by using the same PANDA fiber.

The radio frequency identification (RFID) system has attracting attention as a new identification source that achieves a ubiquitous environment. Each RFID tag has a unique ID code, and is attached on an object whose information it contains. A user reads the unique ID code using RFID readers and obtains information about the object. One of the important applications of RFID technology is the indoor position estimation of RFID tags. It can be applied to navigation systems for people in complex buildings. In this paper, we propose an effective position estimation method named Broad-type Multi-Sensing-Range (B-MSR) method to improve the estimation error of the conventional methods using sensor model. A new reader antenna with two flexible antenna elements is introduced into B-MSR. The distance between two flexible antenna elements can be adjusted. Thus, two kinds of system parameters can be controlled, the distance between two antenna elements and the transmission power of the RFID reader. In this paper, four sensing ranges are settled by controlling the values of two parameters. The performance evaluation shows four characteristics of B-MSR. Firstly, it reduces the initial estimation error. Secondly, it reduces the moving distance. Thirdly, it reduces the number of different sensing points. Fourthly, it shortens the required estimation time.

A low cost, ultra small Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver module with integrated antenna is one of the key technologies for short range millimeter-wave wireless communication. This paper describes a 60 GHz-band transmitter module with integrated dipole antenna. The module consists of three pieces of low-cost organic resin substrate. These substrates are vertically stacked by employing Cu ball bonding 3-dimensional (3-D) system-in-package (SiP) technology and the MMIC's are mounted on each organic substrates by using Au-stud bump bonding (SBB) technique. The planer dipole antenna is fabricated on the top of the stacked organic substrate to avoid the influence of the grounding metal on the base substrate. At 63 GHz, maximum actual gain of 6.0 dBi is obtained for fabricated planar dipole antenna. The measured radiation patterns are agreed with the electro-magnetic (EM) simulated result, therefore the other RF portion of the 3-D front-end module, such as flip chip mounted IC's on the top surface of the module, does not affect the antenna characteristics. The results show the feasibility of millimeter-wave low cost, ultra small antenna integrated module using stacked organic substrates.

On the 11th of March, 2011, a massive earthquake hit the northeast region of Japan. The government of Japan needed to publish information regarding the earthquake and its influences. However, their capacity of Web services overflowed. They called the industry and academia for help for providing stable information service to the people. Industry and academia formed a team to answer the call and named themselves the “EQ project”. This paper describes how the EQ Project was organized and operated, and gives analyses of the statistics. An academic organization took the lead in the EQ Project. Ten organizations which consisted of commercial IT industry and academics specialized in Internet technology, were participating in the EQ Project and they structured the three clusters based on their relationships and technological approach. In WIDE Cluster, one of three clusters in the structure of EQ, the peak number of file accesses per day was over 90 thousand, the mobile browsers was 3.4% and foreign languages (translated contents) were referred 35%. We have also discussed the future information distribution strategies in emergency situation based on the experiences of the EQ Project, and proposed nine suggestions to the MEXT as a future strategy.

The design and measured results of a 120-GHz transmitter and receiver chipset are described in this paper. A simple on-off keying (OOK) modulation is adopted for low power consumption. The proposed transmitter and receiver are fabricated using 65-nm CMOS technology. The current consumption of the transmitter and receiver are 19.2 mA and 48.2 mA respectively. A 9-Gbps PRBS is successfully transferred from the transmitter to the receiver with the bit error rate less than 10-9.

In OFDMA-based digital duplexing (DD) systems, the effective channel impulse response (CIR) is lengthened due to time difference of arrivals (TDoAs) from adjacent subscriber stations (SSs). In this letter, a time-domain shortening filter (TSF) is proposed to shorten the effective CIR by maximizing signal-to-interference ratio for pulse shortening (SIRPS). A time-domain window (TW) is also proposed to reduce the effect of inter-carrier interference (ICI) due to CFO in OFDMA-based DD systems, by maximizing the signal-to-interference and noise ratio for window (SINRW).

In this letter, a precoding design for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) full-duplex relay (FDR) system is proposed. For this system, mitigating the self-interference imposed by the transmit antennas on the receive antennas in the same relay station is crucial for improving the performance of the FDR system. The precoding scheme designed in this study uses block-diagonalization (BD). Using this precoding scheme, FDR capacity analysis is performed in the MIMO downlink relay system. Numerical results on system performance in terms of capacity are shown and discussed.

Recently, a flexible loss recovery scheme, called Active Caching (AC) has been proposed to accomplish a Desired Communication Reliability (DCR) about the whole data packets at a source depending on the various applications. However, since AC does not consider the packet delivery rate of each wireless link on multi-hop forwarding paths, it increases the number of totally transmitted packets to achieve a DCR and thus grows the energy consumption of sensor nodes. Thus, this letter proposes a novel recovery scheme which can minimize the number of totally transmitted packets while satisfying a DCR. By geometric programming, the proposed scheme allocates an optimized one-hop packet transmission rate of each wireless link on the multi-hop forwarding path.

Image colorization is a semi-automatic process of adding colors to monochrome images and videos. Using existing methods, required human assistance can be limited to annotating the image with color scribbles or selecting a reference image, from which the colors are transferred to a source image or video sequence. In the work reported here we have explored how to exploit the textural information to improve this process. For every scribbled image we determine the discriminative textural feature domain. After that, the whole image is projected onto the feature space, which makes it possible to estimate textural similarity between any two pixels. For single image colorization based on a set of color scribbles, our contribution lies in using the proposed feature space domain rather than the luminance channel. In case of color transfer used for colorization of video sequences, the feature space is generated based on a reference image, and textural similarity is used to match the pixels between the reference and source images. We have conducted extensive experimental validation which confirmed the importance of using textural information and demonstrated that our method significantly improves colorization result.

Polycrystalline Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) films were prepared by heat treatment of metallic precursors using dimethylselenium (Se(CH3)2), which is a less hazardous Se source than H2Se gas. CIGS films were fabricated at various Se(CH3)2 supply rates. We investigated the effect of the Se(CH3)2 supply rate on the crystal phase and surface morphology of the films.

A generalized version of a piece-wise constant (ab. PWC) spiking neuron model is presented. It is shown that the generalization enables the model to reproduce 20 activities in the Izhikevich model. Among the activities, we analyze tonic bursting. Using an analytical one-dimensional iterative map, it is shown that the model can reproduce a burst-related bifurcation scenario, which is qualitatively similar to that of the Izhikevich model. The bifurcation scenario can be observed in an actual hardware.