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 feature for classification of shallowly buried landmine-like objects using a ground penetrating radar (GPR) measurement system is proposed and its performance is evaluated. The feature for classification employed here is a time interval between two pulses reflected from top and bottom sides of landmine-like objects. First, we estimate a time resolution required to detect object thickness from GPR data, and check the actual time resolution through laboratory experiment. Next, we evaluate the classification performance using Monte Carlo simulations from dataset generated by a two-dimensional finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The results show that good classification performance is achieved even for landmine-like objects buried at shallow depths under rough ground surfaces. Furthermore, we also estimate the effects of ground surface roughness, soil inhomogeneity, and target inclination on the classification performance.

Next generation free electron lasers aim to generate x-ray pulses with pulse durations down to 30 fs, and possibly even sub-fs. Synchronization of various stages of the accelerator and the probe laser system to the x-ray pulses with stability on the order of the pulse width is necessary to make maximal use of this capability. We are developing an optical timing synchronization system in order to meet this challenge. The scheme is based on generating a train of short optical pulses, with a precise repetition frequency, from a mode-locked laser oscillator and distributed via length-stabilized optical fibers to points requiring synchronization. The timing information is embedded in the repetition frequency and its harmonics. A significant advantage of the optical synchronization system is that multiple mode-locked Ti:sapphire seed oscillators typically present in an accelerator facility can be replaced by the master mode-locked fiber laser. In this paper, we briefly review progress on the development of the synchronization system and then discuss the implementation of this new possibility. Several technical issues related to this approach are analyzed.

When a cylindrically curved concave conducting surface is terminated abruptly at the edge, the whispering gallery (WG) mode propagating toward the edge direction is radiated into the free space from the aperture plane at the edge. In this paper, by applying the new analysis method, we shall derive a uniform geometrical theory of diffraction solution (UTD) for the electric-type WG mode radiation field applicable in the transition region near the geometrical boundaries produced by the incident modal ray on the edge of the curved surface. The UTD is represented by the summation of the solution for the geometrical ray converted from the modal ray of the WG mode and the solution for the uniform edge diffracted ray scattered at the cylindrically curved edge. By comparing with the reference solution obtained numerically from the integral representation of the radiation field, we will confirm the validity and the utility of the UTD proposed in this paper.

This paper describes a CMOS voltage reference circuit which occupies small die area and has less than 1.25 V of output voltage. The reference voltage is determined by a resistor ratio, and it is possible to set the reference voltage from zero to near the supply voltage with the same temperature independence as those of Widlar's and Brokaw's bandgap voltage references. The temperature-independent reference voltage is formed by adding two voltages: the amplified fractional VBE (base-to-emitter voltage) of a bipolar transistor with a negative TC (temperature coefficient) and the amplified VT (thermal voltage) with a positive TC. When a reference voltage smaller than 1.25 V is required, the voltage gain of the amplifier for VBE becomes less than one, and the voltage gain of the amplifier for VT becomes small. This enables the size of bipolar transistors for VT generation to be small. The proposed voltage reference circuit was implemented in a standard 0.35-µm CMOS technology. A temperature-independent current source was also obtained from the same circuit. The results were a TC (temperature coefficient) of 46 ppm/ over 130 change, a line regulation of 2.2 mV/V for the 0.5 V reference voltage with 8.7 µA of current consumption in the voltage reference part, and a 6% change over 130 change for the 13 µA current source.

Thanks to recent improvements in road heating technology, traffic problems due to icy roads are decreasing. However, there has always been concern about the high operational and maintenance cost associated with road heating. One way to reduce the cost is to reduce the time when power is applied for preheating because it is often applied even when a road is not likely to be icy. The authors believe that, if it is possible to forecast accurately whether a road will become icy, unnecessary preheating can be greatly reduced. This paper presents an algorithm for forecasting physical road conditions. The algorithm divides the weather conditions that people perceive daily into 11 patterns. The comparison between the changes in road conditions as determined by our method and known changes in road conditions has shown a 12% increase over previous methods in forecasting accuracy.

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.

This paper deals with a design problem of an observer-based robust preview control system for uncertain discrete-time systems. In this approach, we adopt 2-stage design scheme and we derive an observer-based robust controller with integral and preview actions such that a disturbance attenuation level is satisfactorily small for allowable uncertainties.

In this letter, we propose a new approach to estimate the degree of noise masking based on a sophisticated model for clean speech distribution. This measure, named as noise masking probability (NMP), is incorporated into the feature compensation technique to achieve robust speech recognition in noisy environments. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the performance of the baseline recognition system in the presence of various background noises.

We study on the security proof of the improved efficient-Rabin (ERabin) scheme and the F-FDHS scheme. First, we show that the security theorem of the improved ERabin scheme is not correct, and then provide a correct theorem for it. Second, we show that the security theorem of the F-FDHS scheme lacks an assumption. Finally, we present a way to modify the improved ERabin scheme and the F-FDHS scheme.

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 present theoretical foundations about error estimations of the global Krylov subspace techniques for multiple-inputs multiple-outputs (MIMO) Interconnect reductions. Analytical relationships between Lyapunov functions of the original interconnect network and those of the reduced system generated by the global Arnoldi algorithm will be developed. Under this framework, a new moment matching reduced network is proposed. Also, we will show that the reduced system can be expressed as the original network with some additive perturbations.

This letter focuses on uplink transmission in OFDMA systems. A subcarrier and power allocation problem is formulated that maximizes the throughput of OFDMA uplink systems while satisfying each user's power constraints. A greedy algorithm known to be the most efficient algorithm for this problem can provide a high quality near-optimal solution, but has the disadvantage of incurring a long computation time. As this problem should be solved in a real-time environment, computation time is a very important performance measure of algorithms. In this letter, a computationally efficient algorithm that provides a nearly identical quality, near-optimal solution as the greedy algorithm but requires less than 10% of the computation time of the greedy algorithm is proposed.

We propose a stability-guaranteed horizon size (SgHS) for stabilizing receding horizon control (RHC). It is shown that the proposed SgHS can be represented explicitly in terms of the known parameters of the given system model and is independent of the terminal weighting matrix in the cost function. The proposed SgHS is validated via a numerical example.

Recently, Wu-Chieu proposed an improvement to their original scheme, in order to make the scheme withstand impersonation attacks. However, the improved scheme is susceptible to an off-line password guessing attack and is inefficiently designed. Accordingly, the current letter demonstrates the vulnerability of Wu-Chieu's modified scheme to an off-line password guessing attack and evaluates the efficiency of their schemes and related schemes.

Decoding performance of LDPC (Low-Density Parity-Check) codes is highly dependent on the degree distributions of the Tanner graphs which define the LDPC codes. We compare two LDPC code ensembles, one has a uniform degree distribution and the other a non-uniform one over a BEC (Binary Erasure Channel) and a BSC (Binary Symmetric Channel) thorough DE (Density Evolution). We then derive sufficient conditions on the erasure probability of a BEC and the error probability of a BSC, under which the LDPC code ensembles with uniform degree distributions outperform those with non-uniform degree distributions.

Menger's sponge (MS) is a kind of three-dimensional fractal structure. To analyze non-resonant electromagnetic properties of MS composed of isotropic paraelectric material, a novel, high-speed computation method employing simple recursion equations in terms of scattering amplitudes for two MS's with adjacent stage numbers, which are the parameters describing structural differences of MS's, is formulated. Within the scope of non-resonant electromagnetic phenomena, scattering patterns, forward and backward scattering amplitudes, and total cross sections of MS are investigated as a function of stage number and incident plane waves, and behaviors typical to fractal structures are extracted from the numerical results of the above equations. In addition, scattering properties at infinite stage number are discussed.

This paper proposes an iterative maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) receiver for multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) mobile communications. For exploiting the space, time, and frequency diversity, the low-density parity-check code (LDPC) is used as a channel coding with a built-in interleaver. The receiver employs the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm so as to perform the MAP symbol detection with reasonable computational complexity. The minimum mean square error (MMSE), recursive least squares (RLS), and least mean square (LMS) algorithms are theoretically derived for the channel estimation within this framework. Furthermore, the proposed receiver performs a new scheme called backward symbol detection (BSD), in which the signal detection uses the channel impulse response that is estimated one OFDM symbol later. The advantage of BSD, which is explained from the viewpoint of the message passing algorithm, is that BSD can exploit information on the both precedent and subsequent OFDM symbols, similarly to RLS with smoothing and removing (SR-RLS) [25]. In comparison with SR-RLS, BSD reduces the complexity at the cost of packet error rate (PER) performance. Computer simulations show that the receiver employing RLS for the channel estimation outperforms the ones employing MMSE or LMS, and that BSD can improve the PER performance of the ones employing RLS or LMS.

This paper proposes a new channel estimation method and a new interference cancellation scheme for multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems in the presence of intersymbol interference (ISI). The proposed channel estimation method uses special training sequences (TSs) to have a desirable crest-factor of the transmitted training signal, and to prevent the influence of ISI on the channel estimation performance. By using the recommended training sequences, the ill-conditioned problem of the least square (LS) filter integrated in the proposed channel estimator can be avoided. The proposed interference cancellation scheme uses the estimated channel coefficients and the channel state information (CSI) to reproduce the interference components, which are then iteratively cancelled from the received signals. To reduced the error-floor of the demodulated symbols using for the calculations of the interference components, the so-called remodulation technique is also included in the proposed interference cancellation scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed channel estimation method outperforms conventional channel estimation methods, especially in the presence of ISI and if the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is larger than 15 dB. The combination of the proposed method with a space-time block code (STBC) to combat the interference influences results in an excellent system performance in terms of symbol error ratio (SER). In comparison with a STBC MIMO-OFDM system with sufficient guard interval (GI), this combination gains 1.52 dB of SNR at the same SER of 1.110-6 even after performing only one iteration of interference cancellation.

This paper starts by describing the advantages of cascaded modulation, i.e., using multiple concatenated external modulators to modulate CW (Continuous Wave) light. Next, the paper examines computer simulations of the resulting modulated light waveform shapes and intermodulation distortion values to elucidate the basic modulation characteristics of a cascaded modulation scheme. Examples of applying cascaded modulation to a multi-channel optical signal transmission system are shown, and the characteristics are clarified by optical transmission experiments. For example, the dependency of the signal quality on the modulation depth values of each external modulator is clarified. Moreover, experiments show that cascaded modulation permits the remote insertion of local broadcast programs into wide area broadcast programs. Last, the paper shows that cascaded modulation offers better modulation properties than the conventional single modulation approach.