Scheduling algorithms are crucial in radio resource management especially for multimedia networks. Many scheduling algorithms are based on the assumption of error-free connections, which is not suitable for wireless networks. Therefore, a scheduling algorithm based on the modification of Static Priority (SP) algorithm and Earliest-Due-Date (EDD) algorithm is proposed for wireless multimedia networks with link adaptation in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, various quality of service requirements, such as delay, throughput, and packet loss ratio, are considered. Particularly, the influence of error tolerance of voice communications, which is usually ignored in most scheduling algorithms, is taken into account. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm, compared with SP, EDD, and other scheduling algorithms, succeeds in meeting the delay and packet loss ratio (PLR) requirements at much heavier traffic load.

This paper presents a new signaling architecture for radio-access control in wireless communications systems. Called THREP (for THREe-phase link set-up Process), it enables systems with low-cost configurations to provide tetherless access and wide-ranging mobility by using autonomous radio-link controls for fast cell searching and distributed call management. A signaling architecture generally consists of a radio-access part and a service-entity-access part. In THREP, the latter part is divided into two steps: preparing a communication channel, and sustaining it. Access control in THREP is thus composed of three separated parts, or protocol phases. The specifications of each phase are determined independently according to system requirements. In the proposed architecture, the first phase uses autonomous radio-link control because we want to construct low-power indoor wireless communications systems. Evaluation of channel usage efficiency and hand-over loss probability in the personal handy-phone system (PHS) shows that THREP makes the radio-access sub-system operations in a practical application model highly efficient, and the results of a field experiment show that THREP provides sufficient protection against severe fast CNR degradation in practical indoor propagation environments.

In this paper, we focus on resource allocation schemes for minimizing the energy consumption of subscriber stations (SSs) in uplink flows of the IEEE 802.16 OFDMA systems. The resource allocation schemes assign subcarriers, powers, and data rates to each SS based on the measured signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the uplink channel and predefined modulation and coding scheme as system parameters. Previous research efforts to optimize resource allocation focus on the rate and throughput maximizations, and develop suboptimal heuristic algorithms. However, this paper intends to reduce the energy consumption of SSs by considering the relationship between energy efficiency and resource allocation. In order to clearly formulate the relationship, we use the Multiple Choice Knapsack (MCK) problem, which is proved to be an NP-hard problem. We propose two heuristic schemes to solve the NP-hard problem, which adaptively use the modulation and coding scheme, defined in the IEEE 802.16 OFDMA systems to minimize the required transmission power of each SS. Our simulation results show that the proposed schemes can reduce the energy consumption by up to 53% compared to the channel state information (CSI) scheme, which determines the modulation and coding level only considering the channel state information.

The cognitive radio technique promises to manage and allocate the scarce radio spectrum in the highly varying and disparate modern environments. This paper considers a cognitive radio scenario composed of two queues for the primary (licensed) users and cognitive (unlicensed) users. According to the Markov process, the system state equations are derived and an optimization model for the system is proposed. Next, the system performance is evaluated by calculations which show the rationality of our system model. Furthermore, discussions among different parameters for the system are presented based on the experimental results.

This paper presents a field penetration characteristic, into a metallic wall with a narrow slot, due to a nearby dipole source. Coupled integral equations are derived and solved by applying Galerkin's method of moments (MoM) for calculating the penetrating electric field. It is shown that the 26 dB attenuation level field penetration into the narrow slot occurs at the dipole source position of much more than about 0.6 λ separation distance along the lateral direction from the slot center. It is also found that the 30 dB attenuation levels field penetration appear at the observation positions of much more than about 0.5 λ along the direction of the slot length and about 1.07 λ separation distance along the direction of the slot width from the slot center.

This paper presents a new cycle time synchronization method to transmit isochronous multimedia data by real time in IEEE 1394 over a UWB (ultra wide-band) network. The 1394 TA recommended two methods for the cycle time synchronization. The first method must use two consecutive beacon signals to calculate a drift correction, while the second one eliminates this dependency with minor algorithm changes. As experimental results, the second method achieves 21% performance improvement over the first one. The receipt of two consecutive beacons every time is hard due to the noise in a wireless channel. In addition, this paper provides the procedure of cycle time synchronization, as well as the transaction between 1394 protocol adaptation layer and IEEE 802.15.3 media access layer. The proposed synchronization technique will contribute to transfer isochronous data at IEEE 1394 over UWB audio/visual appliances such as camcorder, HDTV, etc.

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can provide a better bit error rate (BER) performance than rake combining. However, the residual inter-chip interference (ICI) is produced after MMSE-FDE and this degrades the BER performance. Recently, we showed that frequency-domain ICI cancellation can bring the BER performance close to the theoretical lower bound. To further improve the BER performance, transmit antenna diversity technique is effective. Cyclic delay transmit diversity (CDTD) can increase the number of equivalent paths and hence achieve a large frequency diversity gain. Space-time transmit diversity (STTD) can obtain antenna diversity gain due to the space-time coding and achieve a better BER performance than CDTD. Objective of this paper is to show that the BER performance degradation of CDTD is mainly due to the residual ICI and that the introduction of ICI cancellation gives almost the same BER performance as STTD. This study provides a very important result that CDTD has a great advantage of providing a higher throughput than STTD. This is confirmed by computer simulation. The computer simulation results show that CDTD can achieve higher throughput than STTD when ICI cancellation is introduced.

This paper describes the characteristic of negative group delay (NGD) circuits for various configurations including first-order, distributed, and second-order RC circuit configurations. This study includes locus, magnitude, and phase characteristics of the NGD circuits. The simplest NGD circuit is available using first-order RC or RL configuration. As an example of distributed circuit configuration, it is verified that losses in a distributed line causes NGD characteristic at higher cut-off band of a coupled four-line bandpass filter. Also, novel wideband NGD circuits using second-order RC configuration, instead of conventional RLC configuration, are proposed. Adding a parallel resistor to a parallel-T filter enables NGD characteristic to it. Also, a Wien-Robinson bridge is modified to have NGD characteristic by controlling the voltage division ratio. They are fabricated on MMIC substrate, and their NGD characteristics are verified with measured results. They have larger insertion loss than multi-stage RLC NGD circuits, however they can realize second-order NGD characteristic without practical implementation of inductors.

To obtain text information included in a scene image, we first need to extract text regions from the image before recognizing the text. In this paper, we examine human vision and propose a novel method to extract text regions by evaluating textural variation. Human beings are often attracted by textural variation in scenes, which causes foveation. We frame a hypothesis that texts also have similar property that distinguishes them from the natural background. In our method, we calculate spatial variation of texture to obtain the distribution of the degree of likelihood of text region. Here we evaluate the changes in local spatial spectrum as the textural variation. We investigate two options to evaluate the spectrum, that is, those based on one- and two-dimensional Fourier transforms. In particular, in this paper, we put emphasis on the one-dimensional transform, which functions like the Gabor filter. The proposal can be applied to a wide range of characters mainly because it employs neither templates nor heuristics concerning character size, aspect ratio, specific direction, alignment, and so on. We demonstrate that the method effectively extracts text regions contained in various general scene images. We present quantitative evaluation of the method by using databases open to the public.

In this letter, a recursive ICI cancellation technique for cooperative space-time block coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (STBC-OFDM) systems is proposed to mitigate the intercarrier interference (ICI) caused by multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) in cooperative transmission. The proposed technique is shown to mitigate the noise enhancement effect on the STBC-OFDM signals caused by multiple CFOs, and to be effective in reducing ICI especially when the system has a large FFT size and multiple CFOs.

In this paper, we propose a new approach to rotation invariant texture analysis. This method uses the Radon transform with some considerations in direction estimation of textural images. Furthermore, it utilizes the information obtained from the number of peaks in the variance array of the Radon transform as a realty feature. The textural features are then generated after rotation of texture along principle direction. Also, to eliminating the introduced error due to rotation of texture, a simple technique is presented. Experimental results on a set of images from the Brodatz album show a good performance achieved by the proposed method in comparison with some recent texture analysis methods.

Recently, frequency-domain equalization (FDE) has been attracting much attention as a way to improve single-carrier (SC) signal transmission in a frequency-selective wireless channel. Since the SC signal spectrum is spread over the entire signal bandwidth, FDE can take advantage of channel frequency-selectivity and achieve the frequency diversity gain. SC with FDE is a promising wireless signal transmission technique. In this article, we review the pioneering research done on SC with FDE. The principles of simple one-tap FDE, channel estimation, and residual inter-symbol interference (ISI) cancellation are presented. Multi-input/multi-output (MIMO) is an important technique to improve the transmission performance. Some of the studies on MIMO/SC with FDE are introduced.

The beamforming weights which can suppress the interfering signal toward out-of-cell mobile stations in downlink are designed for a time division duplexing based OFDMA system when the channel information is not perfect. The derived beamforming weights do not improve the average SINR performance monotonously with the increased transmit SNR if the inverse of the transmit SNR is used as the regularization factor of the beamforming weights and the channel information obtained by the BS to design the BF weights is not perfect. Therefore, we suggest a simple scheme to select the regularization factor. The proposed beamforming weights improve the performance monotonously with the increased transmit SNR and achieve near-optimal performance. The performance achieved by applying the beamforming weights used in uplink to downlink beamforming is also investigated.

The attenuation effect of the walls of a building on the electromagnetic (EM) field generated by an indoor power line communication (PLC) system is numerically investigated using the finite integration (FI) method. In particular, we focus on the frequency range 2-6 MHz, for which the attenuation effect has not yet been sufficiently analyzed. We model a single, finite-sized wall instead of an entire house, to focus on the dependence of the EM field on the wall structure and also reduce the computational resources required. The EM field strength is evaluated at many points on a view plane 10 m from the wall model, and the results are statistically processed to determine the attenuation effect of the wall. We show that the leakage of an EM field at 2-6 MHz is suppressed by about 30 dB by a reinforced concrete wall. We also show that the main contributor to the attenuation effect is the rebar in the wall. We then investigate the relation between the attenuation effect of a single-wall model and that of a house model. The results show that the attenuation effect of a house model is almost the same as that of a 15-m-wall model. We conclude that the use of a single-wall model instead of a house model is effective in determining the attenuation of the EM leakage. This simple structure reduces analytic space, time, and memory in the evaluation of the dependence on the wall structure of the EM leakage from indoor PLC systems.

Orthogonal multi-carrier direct sequence code division multiple access (orthogonal MC DS-CDMA) is a combination of time-domain spreading and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In orthogonal MC DS-CDMA, the frequency diversity gain can be obtained by applying frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion to a block of OFDM symbols and can improve the bit error rate (BER) performance in a severe frequency-selective fading channel. FDE requires an accurate estimate of the channel gain. The channel gain can be estimated by removing the pilot modulation in the frequency domain. In this paper, we propose a pilot-assisted channel estimation suitable for orthogonal MC DS-CDMA with FDE and evaluate, by computer simulation, the BER performance in a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel.

This paper presents new approaches for the estimation of range between the preceding vehicle and the experimental vehicle, estimation of vehicle size and its projective size, and dynamic camera calibration. First, our proposed approaches adopt a camera model to transform coordinates from the ground plane onto the image plane to estimate the relative position between the detected vehicle and the camera. Then, to estimate the actual and projective size of the preceding vehicle, we propose a new estimation method. This method can estimate the range from a preceding vehicle to the camera based on contact points between its tires and the ground and then estimate the actual size of the vehicle according to the positions of its vertexes in the image. Because the projective size of a vehicle varies with respect to its distance to the camera, we also present a simple and rapid method of estimating a vehicle's projective height, which allows a reduction in computational time for size estimation in real-time systems. Errors caused by the application of different camera parameters are also estimated and analyzed in this study. The estimation results are used to determine suitable parameters during camera installation to suppress estimation errors. Finally, to guarantee robustness of the detection system, a new efficient approach to dynamic calibration is presented to obtain accurate camera parameters, even when they are changed by camera vibration owing to on-road driving. Experimental results demonstrate that our approaches can provide accurate and robust estimation results of range and size of target vehicles.

In this paper, we present a revision of using eigenvalues of covariance matrices proposed by Tsai et al. as a measure of significance (i.e., curvature) for boundary-based corner detection. We first show the pitfall of Tsai et al.'s approach. We then further investigate the properties of eigenvalues of covariance matrices of three different types of curves and point out a mistake made by Tsai et al.'s method. Finally, we propose a modification of using eigenvalues as a measure of significance for corner detection to remedy their defect. The experiment results show that under the same conditions of the test patterns, in addition to correctly detecting all true corners, the spurious corners detected by Tsai et al.'s method disappear in our modified measure of significance.

A 0.13-µm CMOS 2.4-GHz low-noise balun-mixer is proposed, where a noise-canceling transconductance stage is adopted for low-noise characteristics. A current-bleeding circuit with an LC resonator is also adopted to further improve the noise figure of the proposed balun-mixer, without additional DC power consumption. The measured results show a DSB NF of 5.5 dB over output IF frequency ranges of 10 to 100 MHz, a conversion gain of 19 dB, and an input P1 dB of -16 dBm. The proposed balun-mixer is implemented in 0.13-µm CMOS technology and consumes only 4.5 mA from a 1.5-V supply voltage.

A channel code is constructed using sparse matrices for stationary memoryless channels that do not necessarily have a symmetric property like a binary symmetric channel. It is also shown that the constructed code has the following remarkable properties. 1. Joint source-channel coding: Combining channel code with lossy source code, which is also constructed by sparse matrices, a simpler joint source-channel code can be constructed than that constructed by the ordinary block code. 2. Universal coding: The constructed channel code has a universal property under a specified condition.

In this paper, a method of the signal subspace interpolation to constructing a continuous fingerprint database for radio localization is proposed. When using the fingerprint technique, enhancing the accuracy of location estimation requires very fine spatial resolution of the database, which entails much time in collecting the data to build up the database. Interpolated signal subspace is presented to achieve a fine spatial resolution of the fingerprint database. The angle of arrival (AOA) and the measured signal subspace at known locations are needed to obtain the interpolated signal subspaces. The effectiveness of this method is verified by an outdoor experiment and the estimated location using this method was compared with those using the geometrically calculated fingerprint and the measured signal subspace fingerprint techniques.