This paper proposes a low-profile unidirectional supergain antenna applicable to wireless communication devices such as mobile terminals, the Internet of Things and so on. The antennas used for such systems are required to be not only electrically low-profile but also unsusceptible to surrounding objects such as human body and/or electrical equipment. The proposed antenna achieves both requirements due to its supergain property using planar elements and a closely placed planar reflector. The primary antenna is an asymmetric dipole type, and consists of a monopole element mounted on an edge of a rectangular conducting plane. Both elements are placed on a dielectric substrate backed by the planar reflector. It is numerically and experimentally shown that the supergain property is achieved by optimizing the geometrical parameters of the antenna. It is also shown that the impedance characteristics can be successfully adjusted by changing the lengths of the ground plane element and the monopole element. Thus, no additional impedance matching circuit is necessary. Furthermore, it is shown that surrounding objects have insignificant impact on the antenna performance.

This paper analyzes the performance of single-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with non-orthogonal pilots. Specifically, closed-form expressions of the normalized channel estimation error and achievable uplink capacity are derived for both least squares (LS) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation. Then a pilot reconstruction scheme based on orthogonal Procrustes principle (OPP) is provided to reduce the total normalized mean square error (NMSE) of channel estimations. With these reconstructed pilots, a two-step pilot assignment method is formulated by considering the correlation coefficient among pilots to reduce the maximum NMSE. Based on this assignment method, a step-by-step pilot power allocation scheme is further proposed to improve the average uplink signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR). At last, simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approaches.

This study proposes a design and calibration method for a small-footprint, low-frequency, and low-power gate leakage timer using a differential leakage technique for IoT applications. The proposed gate leakage timer is different from conventional ones because it is composed of two leakage sources and exploits differential leakage current for the charging capacitor. This solution alleviates the inherent trade-off between small-footprint and low-frequency in the conventional gate leakage timer. Furthermore, a calibration method to suppress variations of the output frequency is proposed in this paper. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed gate leakage timer, a test chip was fabricated using 55-nm-DDC-CMOS technology. The test chip successfully demonstrates the highest figure of merit (FoM) of the product of the capacitor area (0.072µm2) and output frequency (0.11Hz), which corresponds to an improvement by a factor of 2,121 compared to the conventional one. It also demonstrates the operation with 4.5pW power consumption. The total footprint can be reduced to be 28µm2, which enables low-cost and low-power IoT edges. The scaling scenario shows that the proposed technique is conducive to technology scaling.

A number of all-optical signal processing schemes based on nonlinear optical effects have been proposed and demonstrated for use in future photonic networks. Since various modulation formats have been developed for optical communication systems, all-optical converters between different modulation formats will be a key technology to connect networks transparently and efficiently. This paper reviews our recent works on all-optical modulation format conversion technologies in order to highlight the fundamental principles and applications in variety of all-optical signal processing schemes.

Wireless communication security has become a hot topic in recent years. The directional modulation (DM) is a promising secure communication technique that has attracted attentions of many researchers. Several different frequency diverse arrays (FDAs) are used to obtain the direction-range-dependent DM signals in previous literatures. However, most of them are not ideal enough to obtain a nonperiodic dot-shaped secure area. In this paper, the symmetrical multi-carrier frequency diverse array with logarithmical frequency increment, named the symmetrical-multilog-FDA, is used to obtain the direction-range-dependent DM signals that are normal at the desired locations while disordered at other locations. Based on the symmetrical-multilog-FDA, we derive the closed-form expression of baseband-weighted vector using the artificial-noise-aided zero-forcing approach. Compared with previous schemes, the proposed scheme can obtain a more fine-focusing nonperiodic dot-shaped secure area at the desired location. In addition, it can achieve a point-to-multipoint secure communication for multiple cooperative receivers at different locations.

Smartphone users often want to customize the positions and functions of physical buttons to accommodate their own usage patterns; however, this is unfeasible for electronic mobile devices based on COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) due to high production costs and hardware design constraints. In this letter, we present the design and implementation of customized virtual buttons that are localized using only common built-in sensors of electronic mobile devices. We develop sophisticated strategies firstly to detect when a user taps one of the virtual buttons, and secondly to locate the position of the tapped virtual button. The virtual-button scheme is implemented and demonstrated in a COTS-based smartphone. The feasibility study shows that, with up to nine virtual buttons on five different sides of the smartphone, the proposed virtual buttons can operate with greater than 90% accuracy.

This paper presents a novel model in the field of image co-saliency detection. Previous works simply design low level handcrafted features or extract deep features based on image patches for co-saliency calculation, which neglect the entire object perception properties. Besides, they also neglect the problem of visual similar region's mismatching when designing co-saliency calculation model. To solve these problems, we propose a novel strategy by considering both local prediction and global refinement (LPGR). In the local prediction stage, we train a deep convolutional saliency detection network in an end-to-end manner which only use the fully convolutional layers for saliency map prediction to capture the entire object perception properties and reduce feature redundancy. In the global refinement stage, we construct a unified co-saliency refinement model by integrating global appearance similarity into a co-saliency diffusion function, realizing the propagation and optimization of local saliency values in the context of entire image group. To overcome the adverse effects of visual similar regions' mismatching, we innovatively incorporates the inter-images saliency spread constraint (ISC) term into our co-saliency calculation function. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate consistent performance gains of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods.

Notes on two constructions of zero-difference balanced (ZDB) functions are made in this letter. Then ZDB functions over Ze×∏ki=0 Fqi are obtained. And it shows that all the known ZDB functions using cyclotomic cosets over Zn are special cases of a generic construction. Moreover, applications of these ZDB functions are presented.

Femtocell has been considered as a key promising technology to improve the capacity of a cellular system. However, the femtocells deployed inside a macrocell coverage are potentially suffered from excessive interference. This paper proposes a novel radio resource optimization in closed access femtocell networks based on bat algorithm. Bat algorithm is inspired by the behavior of bats in their echolocation process. While the original bat algorithm is designed to solve the complex optimization problem in continuous search space, the proposed modified bat algorithm extends the search optimization in a discrete search space which is suitable for radio resource allocation problem. The simulation results verify the convergence of the proposed optimization scheme to the global optimal solution and reveal that the proposed scheme based on modified bat algorithm facilitates the improvement of the femtocell network capacity.

This paper investigates the wireless information surveillance in a suspicious millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless communication system via the spoofing relay based proactive eavesdropping approach. Specifically, the legitimate monitor in the system acts as a relay to simultaneously eavesdrop and send spoofing signals to vary the source transmission rate. To maximize the effective eavesdropping rate, an optimization problem for both hybrid precoding design and power distribution is formulated. Since the problem is fractional and non-convex, we resort to the Dinkelbach method to equivalently reduce the original problem into a series of non-fractional problems, which is still coupling. Afterwards, based on the BCD-type method, the non-fractional problem is reduced to three subproblems with two introduced parameters. Then the GS-PDD-based algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal solution by alternately optimizing the three subproblems and simultaneously updating the introduced parameters. Numerical results verify the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed scheme.

Generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) is introduced into distributed compressed sensing (DCS) to reconstruct jointly sparse signals under the mixed support-set model. A GAMP algorithm with known support-set is presented and the matching pursuit generalized approximate message passing (MPGAMP) algorithm is modified. Then, a new joint recovery algorithm, referred to as the joint MPGAMP algorithm, is proposed. It sets up the jointly shared support-set of the signal ensemble with the support exploration ability of matching pursuit and recovers the signals' amplitudes on the support-set with the good reconstruction performance of GAMP. Numerical investigation shows that the joint MPGAMP algorithm provides performance improvements in DCS reconstruction compared to joint orthogonal matching pursuit, joint look ahead orthogonal matching pursuit and regular MPGAMP.

Optical I/O core based on silicon photonics technology and optical/electrical assembly was developed as a fingertip-size optical module with high bandwidth density, low power consumption, and high temperature operation. The advantages of the optical I/O core, including hybrid integration of quantum dot laser diode and optical pin, allow us to achieve 300-m transmission at 25Gbps per channel when optical I/O core is mounted around field-programmable gate array without clock data recovery.

In recent years we have witnessed an increasing demand to process queries on large datasets in Non-ordered Discrete Data Spaces (NDDS). In particular, one type of query in an NDDS, called box queries, is used in many emerging applications including error corrections in bioinformatics and network intrusion detection in cybersecurity. Effective indexing methods are necessary for efficiently processing queries on large datasets in disk. However, most existing NDDS indexing methods were not designed for box queries. Several recent indexing methods developed for box queries on a large NDDS dataset in disk are based on the popular data-partitioning approach. Unfortunately, a space-partitioning based indexing scheme, which is more effective for box queries in an NDDS, has not been studied before. In this paper, we propose a novel indexing method based on space-partitioning, called the BINDS-tree, for supporting efficient box queries on a large NDDS dataset in disk. A number of effective strategies such as node split based on minimum span and cross optimal balance, redundancy reduction utilizing a singleton dimension inheritance property, and a space-efficient structure for the split history are incorporated in the constructing algorithm for the BINDS-tree. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BINDS-tree significantly improves the box query I/O performance, comparing to that of the state-of-the-artdata-partitioning based NDDS indexing method.

We propose a method to find assembly models contained in another assembly model given as a query from a set of 3D CAD assembly models. A 3D CAD assembly model consists of multiple components and is constructed using a 3D CAD software. The proposed method distinguishes assembly models which consist of a subset of components constituting the query model and also whose components have the same layout as the subset of the components. We compute difference between the shapes and the layouts of the components from the sinograms which are constructed by the Radon transform of their projections from various angles. We evaluate the proposed method experimentally using the assembly models which we prepare as a benchmark. The proposed method can also be used to find the database models which contains a query model.

As big data attracts attention in a variety of fields, research on data exploration for analyzing large-scale scientific data has gained popularity. To support exploratory analysis of scientific data, effective summarization and visualization of the target data as well as seamless cooperation with modern data management systems are in demand. In this paper, we focus on the exploration-based analysis of scientific array data, and define a spatial V-Optimal histogram to summarize it based on the notion of histograms in the database research area. We propose histogram construction approaches based on a general hierarchical partitioning as well as a more specific one, the l-grid partitioning, for effective and efficient data visualization in scientific data analysis. In addition, we implement the proposed algorithms on the state-of-the-art array DBMS, which is appropriate to process and manage scientific data. Experiments are conducted using massive evacuation simulation data in tsunami disasters, real taxi data as well as synthetic data, to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

Given a graph G=(V,E), where V and E are vertex and edge sets of G, and a subset VNT of vertices called a non-terminal set, the minimum spanning tree with a non-terminal set VNT, denoted by MSTNT, is a connected and acyclic spanning subgraph of G that contains all vertices of V with the minimum weight where each vertex in a non-terminal set is not a leaf. On general graphs, the problem of finding an MSTNT of G is NP-hard. We show that if G is a series-parallel graph then finding an MSTNT of G is linearly solvable with respect to the number of vertices.

This paper presents a method combining array signal processing and adaptive noise cancellation to suppress unwanted ambient interferences in in situ measurement of radiated emissions of equipment. First, the signals received by the antenna array are processed to form a main data channel and an auxiliary data channel. The main channel contains the radiated emissions of the equipment under test and the attenuated ambient interferences. The auxiliary channel only contains the attenuated ambient interferences. Then, the adaptive noise cancellation technique is used to suppress the ambient interferences based on the correlation of the interferences in the main and auxiliary channels. The proposed method overcomes the problem that the ambient interferences in the two channels of the virtual chamber method are not correlated, and realizes the suppression of multi-source ambient noises in the use of fewer array elements. The results of simulation and experiment show that the proposed method can effectively extract radiated emissions of the equipment under test in complex electromagnetic environment. Finally, discussions on the effect of the beam width of the main channel and the generalization of the proposed method to three dimensionally distributed signals are addressed.

There are different types of social ties among people, and recognizing specialized types of relationship, such as family or friend, has important significance. It can be applied to personal credit, criminal investigation, anti-terrorism and many other business scenarios. So far, some machine learning algorithms have been used to establish social relationship inferencing models, such as Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayesian and so on. Although these algorithms discover family members in some context, they still suffer from low accuracy, parameter sensitive, and weak robustness. In this work, we develop a Novel Family Relationship Recognition (NFRR) algorithm on telecom dataset for identifying one's family members from its contact list. In telecom dataset, all attributes are divided into three series, temporal, spatial and behavioral. First, we discover the most probable places of residence and workplace by statistical models, then we aggregate data and select the top-ranked contacts as the user's intimate contacts. Next, we establish Relational Spectrum Matrix (RSM) of each user and its intimate contacts to form communication feature. Then we search the user's nearest neighbors in labelled training set and generate its Specialized Family Spectrum (SFS). Finally, we decide family relationship by comparing the similarity between RSM of intimate contacts and the SFS. We conduct complete experiments to exhibit effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and experimental results also show that it has a lower complexity.

In this paper, we propose a quality-level selection method for adaptive video streaming with scalable video coding (SVC). The proposed method works on the client with the dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) with SVC. The proposed method consists of two components: introducing segment group and a buffer-aware layer selection algorithm. In general, quality of experience (QoE) performance degrades due to stalling (playback buffer underflow), low playback quality, frequent quality-level switching, and extreme-down quality switching. The proposed algorithm focuses on reducing the frequent quality-level switching, and extreme-down quality switching without increasing stalling and degrading playback quality. In the proposed method, a SVC-DASH client selects a layer every G segments, called a segment group to prevent frequent quality-level switching. In addition, the proposed method selects the quality of a layer based on a playback buffer in a layer selection algorithm for preventing extreme-down switching. We implement the proposed method on a real SVC-DASH system and evaluate its performance by subjective evaluations of multiple users. As a result, we confirm that the proposed algorithm can obtain better mean opinion score (MOS) value than a conventional SVC-DASH, and confirm that the proposed algorithm is effective to improve QoE performance in SVC-DASH.

The influence of pump phase error on phase-sensitive optical amplifier (PSA) repeaters and the waveform degradation due to chromatic dispersion and fiber nonlinearities in the optical multi-relay transmission of quadrature phase-shift keying phase-conjugated twin waves are considered theoretically. First, the influence of noise from the pump phase error, optical local oscillator, receiver, and the amplified spontaneous-emission (ASE) in PSA repeaters is investigated with the assumption that transmission fibers are linear lossy channels. The bit-error rate (BER) is estimated as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio, and the relationship between the number of transmission relays and the fiber launch power is clarified. Waveform degradation due to chromatic dispersion and the optical fiber nonlinearities in transmission fibers are investigated with the noiseless condition, and the maximum repeatable number as a function of the fiber launch power is calculated. Finally, we show the relationship among the maximum repeatable number, standard deviation of pump phase error in PSA repeaters, and the fiber launch power to clarify the optimum transmission condition with consideration of the noise and the waveform degradation.