Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) is a promising mobile computing platform that provides both high performance and high energy efficiency. In an application, loop nests are usually mapped onto CGRA for further acceleration, so optimizing the mapping is an important goal for design of CGRAs. Moreover, obviously almost all of mobile devices are powered by batteries, how to reduce energy consumption also becomes one of primary concerns in using CGRAs. This paper makes three contributions: a) Proposing an energy consumption model for CGRA; b) Formulating loop nests mapping problem to minimize the battery charge loss; c) Extract an efficient heuristic algorithm called BPMap. Experiment results on most kernels of the benchmarks and real-life applications show that our methods can improve the performance of the kernels and lower the energy consumption.

The performance of multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems is not only affected by small-scale multipath fading but also by large-scale fading (i.e., shadowing) and path loss. In this paper, we concentrate on the sum rate distribution of MU-MISO systems employing linear zero-forcing beamforming, accounting for both multipath fading and shadowing effects, as well as spatial correlation at the transmit and receiver sides. In particular, we consider the classical spatially correlated lognormal model and propose closed-form bounds on the distribution of the achievable sum rates in MU-MISO systems. With the help of these bounds, we derive a relationship between the interuser distance and sum rate corresponding to 10% of the cumulative distribution function under different environmental conditions. A practical conclusion from our results based on the considered system is that the effect of spatially correlated shadowing can be considered to be independent when the interuser distance is approximately five times the shadowing correlation distance. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the effects of composite channel attenuation consisting of multipath fading and shadowing is also provided.

A serial ATA PHY fabricated in a 0.15-µm CMOS process performs the serial ATA operation in an asynchronous transition by using large variation in the reference clock. This technique calibrates a transmission signal frequency by utilizing the received signal. This is achieved by calibrating the divide ratio of a spread-spectrum clock generator (SSCG). This technique enables a serial ATA PHY to use reference oscillators with a production-frequency tolerance of less than 400ppm, i.e., higher than the permissible TX frequency variations (i.e., 350ppm). The calibrated transmission signal achieved a total jitter of 3.9ps.

This paper investigates the system-level throughput of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with a successive interference canceller (SIC) in the cellular downlink assuming proportional fair (PF)-based radio resource (bandwidth and transmission power) allocation. The purpose of this study is to examine the possibility of applying NOMA with a SIC to the systems beyond the 4G cellular system. Both the mean and cell-edge user throughput are important in a real system. PF-based scheduling is known to achieve a good tradeoff between them by maximizing the product of the user throughput among users within a cell. In NOMA with a SIC, the scheduler allocates the same frequency to multiple users simultaneously, which necessitates multiuser scheduling. To achieve a better tradeoff between the mean and cell-edge user throughput, we propose and compare three power allocation strategies among users, which are jointly implemented with multiuser scheduling. Extensive simulation results show that NOMA with a SIC with a moderate number of non-orthogonally multiplexed users significantly enhances the system-level throughput performance compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA), which is widely used in 3.9 and 4G mobile communication systems.

A processing system with multiple field programmable gate array (FPGA) cards is described. Each FPGA card can interconnect using six I/O (up, down, left, right, front, and back) terminals. The communication network among FPGAs is scalable according to user design. When the system operates multi-dimensional applications, transmission efficiency among FPGA improved through user-adjusted dimensionality and network topologies for different applications. We provide a fast and flexible circuit configuration method for FPGAs of a multi-dimensional FPGA array. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we assess performance and power consumption of a circuit that calculated 3D Poisson equations using the finite difference method.

For low-density parity-check codes, spatial coupling was proved to boost the performance of iterative decoding up to the optimal performance. As an application of spatial coupling, in this paper, bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) with spatially coupled (SC) interleaving — called SC-BICM — is considered to improve the performance of iterative channel estimation and decoding for block-fading channels. In the iterative receiver, feedback from the soft-in soft-out decoder is utilized to refine the initial channel estimates in linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE) channel estimation. Density evolution in the infinite-code-length limit implies that the SC-BICM allows the receiver to attain accurate channel estimates even when the pilot overhead for training is negligibly small. Furthermore, numerical simulations show that the SC-BICM can provide a steeper reduction in bit error rate than conventional BICM, as well as a significant improvement in the so-called waterfall performance for high rate systems.

The spatial relations between sensors placed for target detection can be inferred from the responses of individual sensors to the target objects. Motivated by this fact, this paper proposes a method for estimating the location of sensors by using their responses to target objects. The key idea of the proposal is that when two or more sensors simultaneously detect an object, the distances between these sensors are assumed to be equal to a constant called the basic range. Thus, new pieces of proximity information are obtained whenever an object passes over the area in which the sensors are deployed. This information is then be aggregated and transformed into a two dimensional map of sensors by solving a nonlinear optimization problem, where the value of the basic range is estimated together. Simulation experiments verify that the proposed algorithm yields accurate estimates of the locations of sensors.

Video traffic occupies a major part of current mobile traffic. The characteristics of video traffic are dominated by the behavior of the video application users. This paper uses a state transition diagram to analyze the behavior of video application users on smart phones. Video application users are divided into two categories; keyword search users and initial screen users. They take different first action in video viewing. The result of our analysis shows that the patience of video application users depends on whether they have a specific purpose when they launch a video application or not. Mobile network operators can improve the QoE of video application users by utilizing the results of this study.

We considered the oxygen diffusivity around a conductive filament of resistive switching oxides, with the aim of designing material appropriate for highly reliable non-volatile memory. Both theoretical and experimental analyses were performed for this consideration. The theoretically obtained oxygen chemical potential difference, which works as a driving force for diffusion, significantly depends on a material. Then, we experimentally confirmed that the oxygen diffusion behaviors vary greatly depending on the chemical potential differences.

An artificial transmission line with variable capacitors as its shunt elements, also known as a nonlinear transmission line, can be used to generate pulsed waveforms with short durations. In this work, the variable capacitors are implemented using ferroelectric materials. Analysis and experimental results of such a ferroelectric-based artificial transmission line are presented. The differential equation that describes the nonlinear transmission line is derived and solved. The analytical expression for the solitary waves propagating along the line is found. An artificial transmission line is fabricated using thin-film barium--strontium--titanate capacitors and commercially available chip inductors. The fabrication process of the ferroelectric-based artificial transmission line is described. On-wafer characterization of the line is performed. Measurement results show that, with proper dc bias and substantial input power, a sinusoidal input waveform turns into a bell-shaped pulse train at the output, demonstrating the pulse-shaping capability of the ferroelectric-based artificial transmission line.

An optimal design method of linear processors intended for a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) full-duplex (FD) amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network is presented under the condition of spatial-domain self-interference nulling. This method is designed to suit the availability of channel state information (CSI). If full CSI of source station (SS)-relay station (RS), RS-RS (self-interference channel), and RS-destination station (DS) links are available, the instantaneous end-to-end capacity is maximized. Otherwise, if CSI of the RS-DS link is either partially available (only covariance is known), or not available, while CSI of the other links is known, then the ergodic end-to-end capacity is maximized. Performance of the proposed FD-AF relay system is demonstrated through computer simulations, especially under various correlation conditions of the RS-DS link.

The current development of video quality assessment algorithms suffers from the lack of available video sequences for training, verification and validation to determine and enhance the algorithm's application scope. The Joint Effort Group of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG-JEG) is currently driving efforts towards the creation of large scale, reproducible, and easy to use databases. These databases will contain bitstreams of recent video encoders (H.264, H.265), packet loss impairment patterns and impaired bitstreams, pre-parsed bitstream information into files in XML syntax, and well-known objective video quality measurement outputs. The database is continuously updated and enlarged using reproducible processing chains. Currently, more than 70,000 sequences are available for statistical analysis of video quality measurement algorithms. New research questions are posed as the database is designed to verify and validate models on a very large scale, testing and validating various scopes of applications, while subjective assessment has to be limited to a comparably small subset of the database. Special focus is given on the principles guiding the database development, and some results are given to illustrate the practical usefulness of such a database with respect to the detailed new research questions.

Maximum radiation efficiency has been derived for homogeneous electrically small antennas. The spherical wave expansion is utilized to express the radiated field and the current distribution on an antenna, and the radiation efficiency is represented by the current, which is expressed in the spherical wave expansion coefficients and the nonradiating current. By using a concept of the nonradiating current, it is shown that the maximum radiation efficiency is achieved if the antenna shape is spherical. The radiation efficiency of a spherical antenna is maximized by varying the expansion coefficients. This radiation efficiency is compared with that of the antenna which achieves the maximum gain and those of linear antennas. The comparison indicates the validity of our proposed upper limit of the radiation efficiency.

Support of incoming traffic differentiation and Quality of Service (QoS) assurance is very important for the development of high performance packet switches, capable of separating traffic flows. In our previous paper, we proposed the implementation of two buffers at each crosspoint of a crossbar fabric that leads to the Dual Crosspoint Queued (DCQ) switch. Inside DCQ switch, one buffer is used to store the real-time traffic and the other for the non-real-time traffic. We also showed that the static priority algorithms can provide the QoS only for the real-time traffic due to their greedy nature that gives the absolute priority to that type of traffic. In order to overcome this problem, in our paper we propose the DCQ switch with the Largest Weighted Occupancy First scheduling algorithm that provides the desired QoS support for both traffic flows. Detailed analysis of the simulation results confirms the validity of proposed solution.

In this paper, we propose a new cross-layer scheme Cooperation between channel Access control and TCP Rate Adaptation (CATRA) aiming to manage TCP flow contention in multi-hop ad hoc networks. CATRA scheme collects useful information from MAC and physical layers to estimate channel utilization of the station. Based on this information, we adjust Contention Window (CW) size to control the contention between stations. It can also achieve fair channel access for fair channel access of each station and the efficient spatial channel usage. Moreover, the fair value of bandwidth allocation for each flow is calculated and sent to the Transport layer. Then, we adjust the sending rate of TCP flow to solve the contention between flows and the throughput of each flow becomes fairer. The performance of CATRA is examined on various multi-hop network topologies by using Network Simulator (NS-2).

It is significant to develop better search methods to handle the rapidly increasing volume of multimedia data. For NN (Nearest Neighbor) search in metric spaces, the TLAESA (Tree Linear Approximating and Eliminating Search Algorithm) is a state of art fast search method. In this paper a method is proposed to improve the TLAESA by revising the tree structure with an optimal number of selected global pivots in the higher levels as representatives and employing the best-first search strategy. Based on an improved version of the TLAESA that succeeds in using the best-first search strategy to greatly reduce the distance calculations, this method improves the drawback that calculating less at the price of the lower pruning rate of branches. The lower pruning rate further can lead to lower search efficiency, because the priority queue used in the adopted best-first search strategy stores the information of the visited but unpruned nodes, and need be frequently accessed and sorted. In order to enhance the pruning rate of branches, the improved method tries to make more selected global pivots locate in the higher levels of the search tree as representatives. As more real distances instead of lower bound estimations of the node-representatives are used for approximating the closet node and for “branch and bound”, not only which nodes are close to the query object can be evaluated more effectively, but also the pruning rate of branches can be enhanced. Experiments show that for k-NN queries in Euclidean space, in a proper pivot selection strategy the proposed method can reach the same fewest distance calculations as the LAESA (Linear Approximating and Eliminating Search Algorithm) which saves more calculations than the TLAESA, and can achieve a higher search efficiency than the TLAESA.

We introduce a graphical calculus for multi-qutrit systems (the qutrit ZX-calculus) based on the framework of dagger symmetric monoidal categories. This graphical calculus consists of generators for building diagrams and rules for transforming diagrams, which is obviously different from the qubit ZX-calculus. As an application of the qutrit ZX-calculus, we give a graphical description of a (2, 3) threshold quantum secret sharing scheme. In this way, we prove the correctness of the secret sharing scheme in a intuitively clear manner instead of complicated linear algebraic operations.

We previously proposed a query-by-sketch image retrieval system that uses an edge relation histogram (ERH). However, it is difficult for this method to retrieve partial objects from an image, because the ERH is a feature of the entire image, not of each object. Therefore, we propose an object-extraction method that uses edge-based features in order to enable the query-by-sketch system to retrieve partial images. This method is applied to 20,000 images from the Corel Photo Gallery. We confirm that retrieval accuracy is improved by using the edge-based features for extracting objects, enabling the query-by-sketch system to retrieve partial images.

Resonant scattering of flexural waves in acoustic waveguide is analysed by using the recursive transfer method (RTM). Because flexural waves are governed by a fourth-order differential equation, a localized wave tends to be induced around the scattering region and dampening wave tails from the localized wave may reach the ends of a simulation domain. A notable feature of RTM is its ability to extract the localized wave even if the dampening tail reaches the end of the simulation domain. Using RTM, the enhanced reflection caused by a localized wave is predicted and the shape of the localized wave is explored at its resonance with the incident wave.

In this paper, we posit that extension of SDN to support deeply and flexibly programmable, software-defined data plane significantly enhance SDN and NFV and their interaction in terms of (1) enhanced interaction between applications and networks, (2) optimization of network functions, and (3) rapid development of new network protocols. All of these benefits are expected to contribute to improving the quality of diversifying communication networks and services. We identify three major technical challenges for enabling software-defined data plane as (1) ease of programming, (2) reasonable and predictable performance and (3) isolation among multiple concurrent logics. We also promote application-driving thinking towards defining software defined data-plane. We briefly introduce our project FLARE and its related technologies and review four use cases of flexible and deeply programmable data plane.