This paper presents a calibration method for RF switch channels of a near-range multistatic linear array radar. The method allows calibration of the channel transfer functions of the RF switches and antenna transfer functions in frequency domain data, without disconnecting the antennas from the radar system. In addition, the calibration of the channels is independent of the directivities of the transmitting and receiving antennas. We applied the calibration method to a 3D imaging step-frequency radar system at 10-20GHz suitable for the nondestructive inspection of the walls of wooden houses. The measurement range of the radar is limited to 0-240mm, shorter than the antenna array length 480mm. This radar system allows acquiring 3D imaging data with a single scan. Using synthetic aperture radar processing, the structural health of braces inside the walls of wooden houses can be evaluated from the obtained 3D volume images. Based on experiment results, we confirmed that the proposed calibration method significantly improves the subsurface 3D imaging quality. Low intensity ghost images behind the brace target were suppressed, deformations of the target in the volume image were rectified and errors the range distance were corrected.

This paper describes a parametric representation of ultra-wideband radar signatures and its physical interpretation. Under the scattering theory of electromagnetic waves, a transfer function of radar scattering is factorized into three elementary parts and a radar signature with three parameters is derived. To use these parameters for radar target classification and identification, the relation between them and the response waveform is analytically revealed and numerically checked. The result indicates that distortion of the response waveform is sensitive to these parameters, and thus they can be expected to be used as features for radar target classification and identification.

In this paper, we propose a received signal interpolation method for enhancing the performance of multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. In general, the performance of the conventional MUSIC algorithm is very sensitive to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received signal. When array elements receive the signals with nonuniform SNR values, the resolution performance is degraded compared to elements receiving the signals with uniform SNR values. Hence, we propose a signal calibration technique for improving the resolution of the algorithm. First, based on original signals, rough direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is conducted. In this stage, using frequency-domain received signals, SNR values of each antenna element in the array are estimated. Then, a deteriorated element that has a relatively lower SNR value than those of the other elements is selected by our proposed scheme. Next, the received signal of the selected element is spatially interpolated based on the signals received from the neighboring elements and the DOA information extracted from the rough estimation. Finally, fine DOA estimation is performed again with the calibrated signal. Simulation results show that the angular resolution of the proposed method is better than that of the conventional MUSIC algorithm. Also, we apply the proposed scheme to actual data measured in the testing ground, and it gives us more enhanced DOA estimation result.

The combination of GPS measurements with the dynamic model via a Kalman filter or an extended Kalman filter, also known as GPS based reduced dynamic orbit determination (RDOD) techniques, have been widely used for accurate and real time navigation of satellites in low earth orbit (LEO). In previous studies, the GPS measurement noise variance is empirically taken as a constant, which is not reasonable because of insufficient prior information or dynamic environment. An improper estimate of the measurement noise may lead to poor performance or even divergence of the filter. In this letter, an adaptive extended Kalman filter (AEKF)-based approach using GPS dual-frequency pseudo-range measurements is presented, where the GPS pseudo-range measurement noise variance is adaptively estimated by the Carrier to Noise Ratio (C/N0) from the tracking loop of GPS receiver. The simulation results show that the proposed AEKF approach can achieve apparent improvements of the position accuracy and almost brings no extra computational burdens for satellite borne processor.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is to identify the right sense of ambiguous words via mining their context information. Previous studies show that classifier combination is an effective approach to enhance the performance of WSD. In this paper, we systematically review state-of-the-art methods for classifier combination based WSD, including probability-based and voting-based approaches. Furthermore, a new classifier combination based WSD, namely the probability weighted voting method with dynamic self-adaptation, is proposed in this paper. Compared with existing approaches, the new method can take into consideration both the differences of classifiers and ambiguous instances. Exhaustive experiments are performed on a real-world dataset, the results show the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods.

The problem of E-polarized plane wave diffraction by a thin material strip is analyzed using the Wiener-Hopf technique together with approximate boundary conditions. Exact and high-frequency asymptotic solutions are obtained. Our final solution is valid for the case where the strip thickness is small and the strip width is large in comparison to the wavelength. The scattered field is evaluated asymptotically based on the saddle point method and a far field expression is derived. Numerical examples on the radar cross section (RCS) are presented for various physical parameters and the scattering characteristics of the strip are discussed in detail.

A Tikhonov regularized RLS algorithm with an exponential weighting factor, i.e., a leaky RLS (LRLS) algorithm was proposed by the author. A quadratic version of the LRLS algorithm also exists in the literature of adaptive filters. In this letter, a cubic version of the LRLS filter which is computationally efficient is proposed when the length of the adaptive filter is short. The proposed LRLS filter includes only a divide per iteration although its multiplications and additions increase in number. Simulation results show that the proposed LRLS filter is faster for its short length than the existing quadratic version of the LRLS filter.

This paper considers a design method of a discrete-time adaptive output feedback control system with a feedforward input based on almost strict positive realness (ASPR-ness). The proposed scheme utilizes the property of ASPR of the controlled plant, and the reference signal is used as feedforward input. The parallel feedforward compensator (PFC) which renders an ASPR augmented controlled plant is also investigated. Besides, it is shown that the output of original plant can track reference signal perfectly without any steady state error. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is confirmed through a pilot-scale temperature control system.

Scaling the supply voltage (Vdd) and threshold voltage (Vth) for minimizing the energy consumption of processors dynamically is highly desired for applications such as wireless sensor network and Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we refer to the pair of Vdd and Vth, which minimizes the energy consumption of the processor under a given operating condition, as a minimum energy point (MEP in short). Since the MEP is heavily dependent on an operating condition determined by a chip temperature, an activity factor, a process variation, and a performance required for the processor, it is not very easy to closely track the MEP at runtime. This paper proposes a simple but effective algorithm for dynamically tracking the MEP of a processor under a wide range of operating conditions. Gate-level simulation of a 32-bit RISC processor in a 65nm process demonstrates that the proposed algorithm tracks the MEP under a situation that operating condition widely vary.

This paper proposes a novel wavelet de-noising scheme regarding the existing burst noises that consist of background and impulsive noises in power-line communications. The proposed de-noising scheme employs multi-level threshold functions to efficiently and adaptively reduce the given burst noises. The experiment results show that the proposed de-noising scheme significantly outperformed the conventional schemes.

Scaling supply voltage (VDD) and threshold voltage (Vth) dynamically has a strong impact on energy efficiency of CMOS LSI circuits. Techniques for optimizing VDD and Vth simultaneously under dynamic workloads are thus widely investigated over the past 15 years. In this paper, we refer to the optimum pair of VDD and Vth, which minimizes the energy consumption of a circuit under a specific performance constraint, as a minimum energy point (MEP). Based on the simple transregional models of a CMOS circuit, this paper derives a simple necessary and sufficient condition for the MEP operation. The simple condition helps find the MEP of CMOS circuits. Measurement results using standard-cell based memories (SCMs) fabricated in a 65-nm process technology also validate the condition derived in this paper.

Recent Network on Chip (NoC) design must take the thermal issue into consideration due to its great impact on the network performance and reliability, especially for 3D NoC. In this work, we design a virtual channel based fully adaptive routing algorithm for the runtime 3D NoC thermal-aware management. To improve the network throughput and latency, we use two virtual channels for each horizontal direction and design a routing function which can not only avoid deadlock and livelock, but also ensure high adaptivity and routability in the throttled network. For path selection, we design a strategy that takes priority to the distance, but also considers path diversity and traffic state. For throttling information collection, instead of transmitting the topology information of the whole network, we use a 12 bits register to reserve the router state for one hop away, which saves the hardware cost largely and decreases the network latency. In the experiments, we test our proposed routing algorithm in different states with different sizes, and the proposed algorithm shows better network latency and throughput with low power compared with traditional algorithms.

Microwave imaging techniques, in particular, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), are promising tools for terrain surface measurement, irrespective of weather conditions. The coherent change detection (CCD) method is being widely applied to detect surface changes by comparing multiple complex SAR images captured from the same scanning orbit. However, in the case of a general damage assessment after a natural disaster such as an earthquake or mudslide, additional about surface change, such as surface height change, is strongly required. Given this background, the current study proposes a novel height change estimation method using a CCD model based on the Pauli decomposition of fully polarimetric SAR images. The notable feature of this method is that it can offer accurate height change beyond the assumed wavelength, by introducing the frequency band-divided approach, and so is significantly better than InSAR based approaches. Experiments in an anechoic chamber on a 1/100 scaled model of the X-band SAR system, show that our proposed method outputs more accurate height change estimates than a similar method that uses single polarimetric data, even if the height change amount is over the assumed wavelength.

To construct good DNA codes based on biologically motivated constraints, it is important that they have a large minimum Hamming distance and the number of GC-content is kept constant. Also, maximizing the number of codewords in a DNA code is required for given code length, minimum Hamming distance, and number of GC-content. In most previous works on the construction of DNA codes, quaternary constant weight codes were directly used because the alphabet of DNA strands is quaternary. In this paper, we propose new coding theoretic constructions of DNA codes based on the binary Hadamard matrix from a binary sequence with ideal autocorrelation. The proposed DNA codes have a greater number of codewords than or the equal number to existing DNA codes constructed from quaternary constant weight codes. In addition, it is numerically shown that for the case of codes with length 8 or 16, the number of codewords in the proposed DNA code sets is the largest with respect to the minimum reverse complementary Hamming distances, compared to all previously known results.

We describe a field experiment of flexible modulation format adaptation on a real-time 400Gbit/s/ch DSP-LSI. This real-time DSP-LSI features OSNR estimation, practical simplified back propagation, and high gain soft-decision forward error correction. With these techniques, we have successfully demonstrated modulation format allocation and transmission of 56-channel 400Gbit/s-2SC-PDM-16QAM and 200Gbit/s-2SC-PDM-QPSK signals in 216km and 3246km standard single mode fiber, respectively.

Range resolution is one of the metrics of radar performance. Synthetic bandwidth radar has been proposed for high-range-resolution. The transmitted frequency and down-conversion frequency of this type of radar are shifted by fixed amounts from pulse to pulse. Received signals are synthesized by taking IFFT for high-range-resolution. However, this type of radar has a problem with second-time-around echoes since multiple pulses are utilized. Moreover, a range shift occurs due to Doppler velocity. Thus second-time-around echo suppression and Doppler velocity compensation are required for accurate target range measurement. We show in this paper a Doppler velocity measurement method with second-time-around echo suppression for synthetic bandwidth radars. Our proposed method interleaves the transmission of ascending and descending frequency sequences. The Doppler velocity is measured by using a Fourier transform of the multiplication of the signals received using both sequences. The transmitted frequency difference of the adjacent pulses is wider than the bandwidth of the matched filter, so the second-time-around echoes are down-converted to the outside band of the matched filter and suppressed. We verify the principle of the proposed method using numerical simulations and experiments. The results show that second-time-around echoes were suppressed by 7.8dB, the Doppler velocity could be obtained and the range shift due to Doppler velocity was reduced by 7.37 times compared to the conventional SBR.

A fast parameter estimation method with a coarse estimation and a fine estimation for polyphase P coded signals is proposed. For a received signal with N sampling points, the proposed method has an improved performance when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is larger than 2dB and a lower computational complexity O(N logs N) compared with the latest time-frequency rate estimation method whose computational complexity is O(N2).

In this paper, extended polar codes based on re-polarization technique are proposed. The presented schemes extend a conventional polar code of length N to length N+q, which stand in contrast to known length-compatible schemes such as puncturing and shortening techniques that reduce the length from N to N-q. For certain specific lengths, the waterfall region performance of our extended polar code is superior to that of other length-compatible polar codes. It provides better reliability and reduces the management overhead in several storage devices and communications systems. In essence, extended polar codes are created by re-polarizing the q least reliable nonfrozen bit-channels with the help of q additional frozen bit-channels. It is proved that this re-polarization enhances the reliability of these bits. Moreover, the extended schemes can be not only modified to improve decoding performance, but generalized as a m-stage scheme to improve throughput significantly. With parallel operation, the throughput is improved around 2m-1 times when q is small. Compared to a shortened polar code with length 1536, the encoding and decoding complexities of an extended polar code are only 50% and 60.5%, respectively.

In this paper, we present the roles played by millimeter-waves in the realization of an Internet of Things (IoT) society. Millimeter-waves are becoming essential frequency resources, enabling ultra-high-speed wireless networks supporting massive data traffic and high-resolution sensor devices. Multiple antenna technologies such as phased arrays, sector antennas, and MIMO signal processing are key technologies for putting these into practical use. In this paper, various examples of integration of multi-antenna systems are shown, as well as demonstration on 60GHz-band millimeter-wave wireless access and 79GHz-band high-resolution radar. We also propose applications to ITS for an IoT society, combining millimeter-wave wireless access and radar sensors, and discuss technical issues to be solved in the future.

Improving energy efficiency is critical for embedded systems in our rapidly evolving information society. Near real-time data processing tasks, such as multimedia streaming applications, exhibit a common fact that their deadline periods are longer than their input intervals due to buffering. In general, executing tasks at lower performance is more energy efficient. On the other hand, higher performance is necessary for huge tasks to meet their deadlines. To minimize the energy consumption while meeting deadlines strictly, adaptive task scheduling including dynamic performance mode selection is very important. In this work, we propose an energy efficient slack-based task scheduling algorithm for such tasks by adapting to task size variations and applying DVFS with the help of statistical analysis. We confirmed that our proposal can further reduce the energy consumption when compared to oracle frame-based scheduling.