This paper addresses the problem of inter-domain QoS routing with Service Level Agreements (SLA) for data transport between peering domains, using virtual-trunk type aggregates. The problem is formally stated and formulated in Integer Linear Programming. As a practical solution, we define the QoS_INFO extension to the BGP routing protocol, conveying three different QoS metrics (light load delay, assigned bandwidth and a congestion alarm), and a path selection algorithm using a combination of these metrics. We present simulation results of QoS_INFO, standard BGP, and BGP with the QoS_NLRI extension, and compare them with the optimal route set provided by the ILP formulation. The results show that our proposal yields better QoS than standard BGP or BGP with the QoS_NLRI extension, since it is able to efficiently avoid congested paths, and that the impact of QoS_INFO in route stability is relatively low.

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are one of the most powerful error correcting codes and are attracting much attention these days. LDPC codes are promising for communications and broadcasting as well where the use of error correcting codes are essential. LDPC codes have been standardized in some communication standards, such as, IEEE802.16e, DVB-S2, IEEE802.3an (10BASE-T), and so on. The performance of LDPC codes largely depend on their code structure and decoding algorithm. In this paper, we present the basics of LDPC codes and their decoding algorithms. We also present some LDPC codes that have good performance and are receiving much attention particularly in communication systems. We also overview some standardized LDPC codes, the LDPC codes standardized in DVB-S2 and the IEEE802.16e standard LDPC codes. Moreover, we present some research on LDPC coded MIMO systems and HARQ using LDPC codes.

This paper investigates a design and performance of 4-parallel MB-OFDM UWB receiver. The performance of the proposed MB-OFDM UWB receiver using a 4-parallel synchronization structure is degraded by 0.25 dB compared with that of a receiver using a 1-parallel synchronization structure in the maximum frequency/sampling clock offset tolerance in an AWGN channel. Considering other impairments, including imperfect synchronization algorithms, the effect of quantization error by the 4-parallel synchronization structure is negligible in a multi-path channel environment as well as in an AWGN channel, as identified in simulation results.

In this paper, we propose an effective asynchronous datapath synthesis system to optimize statistical performance of asynchronous systems. The proposed algorithm is a heuristic method which simultaneously performs scheduling and resource binding. During the design process, decisions will be made based on the statistical schedule length analysis. It is demonstrated that asynchronous datapaths with the reduced mean total computation time are successfully synthesized for some datapath synthesis benchmarks.

We propose a new cyclic postfix based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. The proposed system shows superior performance in symbol time synchronization while achieving channel estimation performance comparable to that of conventional cyclic prefix based OFDM system. In the proposed system, an identical postfix is generated at the end of each OFDM symbol by inserting pilot values amongst the data symbols in a frequency domain and performing Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) operation on it. Robust time synchronization is achieved by auto- and cross-correlating the postfix. Also, time or frequency domain channel estimation can be realized by using properly designed postfix according to channel estimation method.

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) can take advantage of the frequency-selectivity of the channel to improve the transmission performance in a frequency selective fading channel. To further improve the transmission performance, the transmit diversity technique can be used. Cyclic delay transmit diversity (CDTD) can strengthen the frequency-selectivity while space-time transmit diversity (STTD) can achieve the antenna diversity gain. In this paper, we propose a 4-antenna space-time cyclic delay transmit diversity (STCDTD), which is a combination of 2-antenna STTD and 2-antenna CDTD schemes, for orthogonal multi-code direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) using FDE. We evaluate the BER performance and the throughput performance by computer simulation and compare them with the original CDTD and STTD schemes.

The utilization of a high-Tc superconductor for implementing a superconducting qubit is to be expected. Recent researches on the quantum property of Josephson junctions in high-Tc superconductors indicate that the low energy quasiparticle excitation is weak enough to observe the macroscopic quantum tunneling. Therefore, a detailed study on the quantum property of high-Tc Josephson junctions becomes more important for applications. We show our experimental results of the macroscopic tunneling of current biased intrinsic Josephson junctions in Bi-2212 and its resonant activation in the presence of microwave radiation.

We develop a maximum likelihood estimation scheme for correcting the carrier frequency offsets prior to the general intercarrier interference (ICI) self-cancellation in the OFDM systems. Since the same data symbols employed for ICI self-cancellation are also used for frequency offset estimation, the proposed scheme does not consume additional bandwidth. The combined use of the estimation algorithm and ICI self-cancellation scheme provides both frequency offset compensation and ICI reduction hence improves the system performance greatly. The effectiveness of the proposed estimation-cancellation scheme is further verified by calculating the bit error rates of various OFDM receivers, and substantial improvements are found.

IEEE 802.11 DCF is an asynchronous and distributed MAC protocol which does not require the existence of a central controller for medium access coordination. This flexibility, which is due to DCF's contention-based nature, comes at the expense of the overhead associated with contention resolution. The overhead consists of frame collision time and channel idle time, which is particularly severe when channel is saturated. In this paper, we present an enhancement of DCF which aims at reducing its contention resolution overhead by equipping it with a distributed reservation mechanism. The proposed reservation mechanism enhances collision avoidance mechanism of DCF by enforcing a partially ordered medium access through an implicit agreement between neighboring nodes. Simulation results, using ns-2 network simulator, show that the added reservation scheme 1) effectively reduces DCF's overhead and improves channel utilization particularly when node density and traffic load is high, 2) significantly enhance DCF's fairness.

In this paper, we present a design method for fixed-width squarer that receives an n-bit input and produces an n-bit squared product. To efficiently compensate for the truncation error, modified Booth-folding encoder signals are used for the generation of error compensation bias. The truncated bits are divided into two groups (major and minor) depending upon their effects on the truncation error. Then, different error compensation methods are applied to each group. By simulations, it is shown that the proposed fixed-width squarers have lower error than other fixed-width squarers and are cost-effective.

An optimization model with maximum ratio combining (MRC) diversity soft handover is proposed for WCDMA base station location planning with heuristic algorithm, which can calculate the influence of MRC diversity soft handover directly in the process of base station location planning. Experimental results show that the proposed model can get better capacity and coverage performance in the planning results than the traditional optimization model without MRC diversity.

We investigate the usefulness of the topology optimization with the finite element method in the optimization of an H-plane waveguide component. Design sensitivity is computed efficiently using the adjoint variable method. Employing the optimization procedure, optimized structures of an H-plane waveguide filter and T-junction are obtained from an initial homogeneous structure.

This paper proposes a butterfly structure for Viterbi decoders, which works for convolutional codes of all rates k/n. The proposed butterfly structure can exploit the inherent symmetry of trellis branches, so that only some branch metrics need to be computed, while the others can be derived from the computed branches. Consequently, the computational complexity of the Viterbi decoder can be significantly reduced without any error performance loss. The applicability of the butterfly structure is validated by the best codes of rates 1/2, 2/3, and 3/4. Most of the best codes can apply the butterfly structure to reduce their branch metric computation complexity by a factor of 2 or 4. This study also reports a number of new codes with high branch symmetry under the symmetry consideration. Their branch metric computation can be reduced by a factor of 4, 8 or 16 with the similar performance to the best codes.

In this paper, we propose an integral-type T-S fuzzy control scheme to deal with the regulation problem of buck converters without current sensors. This current sensorless control of converters provides the output voltage to achieve zero steady-state error and is with high robust performance. The stability of the overall closed-loop system is rigorously analyzed by using Lyapunov's method. Based on an appropriate assumption, the separation principle can still succeed in the control problems. Hence, the controller and observer gains can be separately obtained by solving LMIs via Matlab's toolbox. The observer-based controller is realized with Simulink and digital signal processors (DSPs). The simulation and experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed schemes and show the satisfactory performance for the power converters.

In this letter,we design a special preamble composed of two OFDM training blocks with different numbers of identical parts. Based on the designed preamble, we propose a method to estimate frequency offset utilizing initial estimates from the two OFDM training symbols. By elaborately selecting the numbers of identical parts for the two training blocks, the proposed estimator provides a much larger estimate range than conventional estimators using identical parts. Computer simulations show that the proposed estimator exhibits superior estimate performance, while maintaining low computational complexity.

A secure and efficient route discovery protocol is proposed for ad hoc networks, where only one-way hash functions are used to authenticate nodes in the ROUTE REQUEST, while additional public-key cryptography is used to guard against active attackers disguising a node in the ROUTE REPLY.

This paper proposes a synthesis method of all low-voltage CMOS instantaneous-companding log domain integrators. The method is based on the exhaustive search of all low-voltage CMOS instantaneous-companding log domain integrators. All the integrators are derived from a general block diagram. A function of each block can be realized by any of a family of circuits and elemental circuits chosen from such families are combined to build an integrator. It is clarified that each family contains a few circuit topologies. All topologies of integrators including new ones are obtained from combinational procedure. Comparing characteristics of all generated integrators, ones satisfying required performances are found out.

In speaker adaptation for speech synthesis, it is desirable to convert both voice characteristics and prosodic features such as F0 and phone duration. For simultaneous adaptation of spectrum, F0 and phone duration within the HMM framework, we need to transform not only the state output distributions corresponding to spectrum and F0 but also the duration distributions corresponding to phone duration. However, it is not straightforward to adapt the state duration because the original HMM does not have explicit duration distributions. Therefore, we utilize the framework of the hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM), which is an HMM having explicit state duration distributions, and we apply an HSMM-based model adaptation algorithm to simultaneously transform both the state output and state duration distributions. Furthermore, we propose an HSMM-based adaptive training algorithm to simultaneously normalize the state output and state duration distributions of the average voice model. We incorporate these techniques into our HSMM-based speech synthesis system, and show their effectiveness from the results of subjective and objective evaluation tests.

We propose and demonstrate the all-optical analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) using optical delay line encoders. Experimental results show that input analog signals are successfully converted into 3-bit digital signals at a bit rate of 40 Gb/s.

We have previously developed a concatenative speech synthesizer based on the plural speech unit selection and fusion method that can synthesize stable and human-like speech. In this method, plural speech units for each speech segment are selected using a cost function and fused by averaging pitch-cycle waveforms. This method has a large computational cost, but some platforms require a speech synthesis system that can work within limited hardware resources. In this paper, we propose an offline unit fusion method that reduces the computational cost. In the proposed method, speech units are fused in advance to make a pre-fused speech unit database. At synthesis time, a speech unit for each segment is selected from the pre-fused speech unit database and the speech waveform is synthesized by applying prosodic modification and concatenation without the computationally expensive unit fusion process. We compared several algorithms for constructing the pre-fused speech unit database. From the subjective and objective evaluations, the effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by the results that the quality of synthetic speech of the offline unit fusion method with 100 MB database is close to that of the online unit fusion method with 93 MB JP database and is slightly lower to that of the 390 MB US database, while the computational time is reduced by 80%. We also show that the frequency-weighted VQ-based method is effective for construction of the pre-fused speech unit database.