Coalition Structure Generation (CSG) is a main research issue in the domain of coalition games. A majority of existing works assume that the value of a coalition is independent of others in the coalition structure. Recently, there has been interest in a more realistic settings, where the value of a coalition is affected by the formation of other coalitions. This effect is known as externality. The focus of this paper is to make use of Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) to solve the CSG problem where externalities may exist. In order to reduce the exponentially growing number of possible solutions in the CSG problem, we follow the previous works by representing the CSG problem as sets of rules in MC-nets (without externalities) and embedded MC-nets (with externalities). Specifically, enlightened by the previous MC-net-based algorithms exploiting the constraints among rule relations to solve the CSG problem, we encode such constraints into weighted partial MaxSAT (WPM) formulas. Experimental results demonstrate that an off-the-shelf MaxSAT solver achieves significant improvements compared to the previous algorithm for the same set of problem instances.

We address the problem of estimating the difference between two probability densities. A naive approach is a two-step procedure that first estimates two densities separately and then computes their difference. However, such a two-step procedure does not necessarily work well because the first step is performed without regard to the second step and thus a small error in the first stage can cause a big error in the second stage. Recently, a single-shot method called the least-squares density-difference (LSDD) estimator has been proposed. LSDD directly estimates the density difference without separately estimating two densities, and it was demonstrated to outperform the two-step approach. In this paper, we propose a variation of LSDD called the constrained least-squares density-difference (CLSDD) estimator, and theoretically prove that CLSDD improves the accuracy of density difference estimation for correctly specified parametric models. The usefulness of the proposed method is also demonstrated experimentally.

Blur distortion is a common artifact in image communication and affects the perceived sharpness of a digital image. In this paper, we capitalize on the mathematical knowledge of Gaussian convolution and propose a strategy to minimally reblur test images. From the reblur algorithm, synthetic reblur images are created. We propose a new blind blur metric which makes use of the reblur images to produce blur scores. Compared to other no-reference blur assessments, the proposed method has the advantages of fast computation and training-free operation. Experiment results also show that the proposed method can produce blur scores which are highly correlated with human perception of blurriness.

An optoelectronic 32-bit serial-to-parallel converter with a novel conversion scheme and shared-trigger configuration has been developed for the label processing of 100-Gbps (25-Gbps $ imes 4 lambda)$ optical packets. No external optical trigger source is required to operate the converter, as the optical packet itself is used to perform self-triggering. Compared to prior optoelectronic label converters, the new device has a much higher gain even while converting labels at higher data rates, and exhibits tolerance to the voltage swing of received packets. The device response is presented together with the experimental demonstration of serial-to-parallel conversion for 4 different labels at 25 Gbps.

In this paper, the function expansion based topology optimization is employed to the automatic optimization of the waveguide dispersion property, and the optimum design of low-dispersion slow-light photonic crystal waveguides is demonstrated. In order to realize low-dispersion and large group index, an objective function to be optimized is expressed by the weighted sum of the objective functions for the desired group index and the low-dispersion property, and weighting coefficients are updated through the optimization process.

In this work, a gate-all-around (GAA) tunneling field-effect transistor (TFET) with InGaAs/Si heterojunction for high-performance and low-standby power operations is studied. Gallium (Ga) compositon ($x)$ in In$_{1-x}$Ga$_{x}$As source substantially affects the physical properties related with device performances including lattice constant, bandgap energy, effective tunneling mass, channel mobility, and others. Thus, it is worthy investigating the effect of Ga fraction on performances of the proposed heterojunction TFET. For this goal, the device design and its performance evaluation are carried out by technology computer-aided design (TCAD). Direct-current (DC) performances are investigated in terms of on-state current ($I_{ m{on}})$, off-state current ($I_{ m{off}})$, current ratio ($I_{ m{on}}$/$I_{ m{off}})$, and subthreshold swing ($S$). Furthermore, it is shown that the device with an n-type Si insertion layer between source and channel demonstrates the enhanced DC characteristics.

The main purpose of this paper is to apply the boundary integral equation (BIE) method to the analysis of spoof localized surface plasmons (spoof LSPs) excited in a perfectly conducting cylinder with longitudinal corrugations. Frequency domain BIE schemes based on electric field integral equation (EFIE), magnetic field integral equation (MFIE) and combined field integral equation (CFIE) formulations are used to solve two-dimensional electromagnetic (EM) problems of scattering from the cylinder illuminated by a transverse electric plane wave. In this approach effects of spoof LSPs are included in the secondary surface current and charge densities resulting from the interaction between the plane wave and the cylinder. Numerical results obtained with the BIE schemes are validated by comparison with that of a recently proposed modal solution based on the metamaterial approximation.

To implement a wideband bandpass filter with improved skirt-selectivity and out-band characteristics, a new parallel-coupled three-line unit with two short-circuited stubs symmetrically-loaded at the center line is proposed. Unlike most traditional ones, the passband of the proposed parallel-coupled three-line structure is based on the cross-coupling between non-adjacent lines rather than the direct-coupling between adjacent ones, whereas a pair of attenuation poles is found in the stopbands. After revealing its work mechanism, an efficient filter-design-scheme is correspondingly proposed for the presented structure. Firstly, based on a chebyshev-filter synthesis theory, a wideband passband filter consisting of a parallel-coupled two-line and two short-circuited stubs loaded at the input- and output- ports is designed. Furthermore, by putting a properly-designed 3/4-wavelength stepped-impedance resonator (SIR) in between the parallel-coupled two lines, two attenuation poles are then realized at the frequencies very close to the cutoff ones. Accordingly, the roll-off characteristics of the filter are significantly-improved to greater than 100,dB/GHz. Furthermore, two-section open-ended stubs are used to replace the short-circuited ones to realize a pair of extra attenuation poles in stopbands. To validate the proposed techniques, a wideband filter with a bandwidth of 3--5,GHz (Fractional bandwidth (FBW) $= (5,GHz-3,GHz)/4,GHz =50%)$ was designed, simulated, fabricated and measured. The measured responses of the filter agree well with the simulation and theoretical ones, which validates the effectiveness of the newly-proposed three-line unit and the corresponding design scheme.

Luby Transform (LT) codes are the first practical implementation of digital fountain codes. In LT codes, encoding symbols are independently generated so as to realize the universal property which means that performance is independent of channel parameters. The universal property makes LT codes able to provide reliable delivery simultaneously via channels of different quality while it may also limit the flexibility of LT codes. In certain application scenarios, such as real-time multimedia transmission, most receivers have tolerable channels whose erasure rates are not fixed, and channels of high erasure rate are outside the design box. In this paper, Connection Choice (CC) codes are proposed to trade the universal property for better performance. The key to CC codes is replacement of random selection with tournament selection. Tournament selection can equalize the frequency of input symbols to join encoding and change the degree distribution of input symbols. Our study indicates that CC codes with appropriate degree distributions provide better performance than the best known LT code when channels of high erasure rate can be ignored. CC codes enable system designers to customize digital fountain codes by taking into account the distribution of the erasure rate and create a new possibility for setting trade-offs between performance and erasure rate.

The traditional multicast switch fabrics, which were mainly developed from the unicast switch fabrics, currently are not able to achieve high efficiency and flexible large-scale scalability. In the light of lattice theory and multicast concentrator, a novel multistage interconnection multicast switch fabric is proposed in this paper. Comparing to traditional multicast switch fabrics, this multicast switch fabric has the advantages of superior scalability, wire-speed, jitter-free multicast with low delay, and no queuing buffer. This paper thoroughly analyzes the performance of the proposed multicast switch fabric with supporting priority-based multicast. Simulations on packet loss rate and delay are discussed and presented at normalized load. Moreover, a detailed FPGA implementation is given. Practical network traffic tests provide evidence supporting the feasibility and stability of the proposed fabric.

With the advances in wireless Internet and mobile positioning technology, location-based services (LBSs) have become popular. In LBSs, users must send their exact locations in order to use the services, but they may be subject to several privacy threats. To solve this problem, query processing algorithms based on a cloaking method have been proposed. The algorithms use spatial cloaking methods to blur the user's exact location in a region satisfying the required privacy threshold (k). With the cloaked region, an LBS server can execute a spatial query processing algorithm preserving their privacy. However, the existing algorithms cannot provide good query processing performance. To resolve this problem, we, in this paper, propose a k-NN query processing algorithm based on network Voronoi diagram for spatial networks. Therefore, our algorithm can reduce network expansion overhead and share the information of the expanded road network. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms, we have conducted extensive performance evaluations. The results show that our algorithm achieves better performance on retrieval time than the existing algorithms, such as PSNN and kRNN. This is because our k-NN query processing algorithm can greatly reduce a network expansion cost for retrieving k POIs.

We propose a power-saving mechanism (PSM) specific to request-and-response-based applications, which simply changes the order of the operating procedure of the legacy PSM by considering the attributes of the request-and-response delay. We numerically analyze the PSM with respect to the energy consumption and buffering delay and characterize this performance by employing a simple energy-delay trade-off (EDT) curve that is determined by the operating parameters. The resulting EDT curve clearly shows that the proposed PSM outperforms the legacy PSM.

Smart city services are implemented using various data collected from houses and infrastructure within a city. As the volume and variety of the smart city data becomes huge, individual services have suffered from expensive computation effort and large processing time. In order to reduce the effort and time, this paper proposes a concept of Materialized View as a Service (MVaaS). Using the MVaaS, every application can easily and dynamically construct its own materialized view, in which the raw data is converted and stored in a convenient format with appropriate granularity. Thus, once the view is constructed, the application can quickly access necessary data. In this paper, we design a framework of MVaaS specifically for large-scale house log, managed in a smart-city data platform. In the framework, each application first specifies how the raw data should be filtered, grouped and aggregated. For a given data specification, MVaaS dynamically constructs a MapReduce batch program that converts the raw data into a desired view. The batch is then executed on Hadoop, and the resultant view is stored in HBase. We present case studies using house log in a real home network system. We also conduct an experimental evaluation to compare the response time between cases with and without MVaaS.

An optical flip-flop circuit with a single semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) using two orthogonal polarization states is proposed. The optical set / reset input and output signals are at a single wavelength. The flip-flop circuit consists of an SOA, a polarization combiner, a polarization splitter, two directional couplers, and two phase shifters. No continuous light source is required to operate the circuit. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the operation performance. Polarization dependence in SOA is considered in the analysis at a single wavelength operation, and numerically simulated results are presented. We confirm that the flip-flop circuit with a feedback-loop length of 15~mm can be operated at switching time of around 3~ns by 1~ns set / reset pulses. The flip-flop performance is discussed from viewpoints of transient overshoot and contrast at the steady on-off states.

We investigate resolution improvement in optical quantization with keeping high sampling rate performance in optical sampling. Since our optical quantization approach uses power-to-wavelength conversion based on soliton self-frequency shift, a spectral compression can improve resolution in exchange for sampling rate degradation. In this work, we propose a different approach for resolution improvement by parallel use of dispersion devices so as to avoid sampling rate degradation. Additional use of different dispersion devices can assist the wavelength separation ability of an original dispersion device. We demonstrate the principle of resolution improvement in 3 bit optical quantization. Simulation results based on experimental evaluation of 3 bit optical quantization system shows 4 bit optical quantization is achieved by parallel use of dispersion devices in 3 bit optical quantization system. The maximum differential non-linearity (DNL) and integral non-linearity (INL) are 0.49 least significant bit (LSB) and 0.50 LSB, respectively. The effective number of bits (ENOB) estimated to 3.62 bit.

We demonstrate an all-optical non-return-to-zero differential phase shift keying (NRZ-DPSK) to return-to-zero differential phase shift keying (RZ-DPSK) format conversion with wavelength-shift-free and pulsewidth tunable operations by using a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-based switch. An NRZ-DPSK signal is injected into the SOA-based switch with an RZ clock, and is converted to RZ-DPSK signal owing to the nonlinear effects inside the SOA. In this scheme, the wavelength of the converted RZ-DPSK signal is maintained as the original wavelength of the input NRZ-DPSK signal during the format conversion. Moreover, the pulsewidth of the converted signal is tunable in a wider operating range from 30 to 60 ps. The format conversion with pulsewidth tunability is based on cross-phase modulation (XPM) and cross-gain modulation (XGM) effects in the SOA. The clear eye diagrams, optical spectra and the bit-error-rate (BER) characteristics show high conversion performance with the wide pulsewidth tuning range. For all cases of the converted RZ-DPSK signal with different pulsewidths, the receiver sensitivities at a BER of 10$^{-9}$ for the converted RZ-DPSK signal were 0.7 to 1.5 dB higher than the receiver sensitivity of the input NRZ-DPSK signal.

This paper presents a comparative study of the number of pieces of optical transport equipment, network cost and power consumption depending on the transmission reach of the 400-Gb/s-based signal between flexible-bitrate networks using 100-Gb/s and 400-Gb/s signals and 100-Gb/s-based single-line-rate networks. In this study, we use three types of network topologies: a North American network topology, a European network topology and a Japan photonic network topology. As for the transmission reach of the 400-Gb/s-based signal, considering performance margins, different transmission reaches of the 400-Gb/s signal are assumed varying from 300km to 600km with 100-km increments. We show that the 100-Gb/s and 400-Gb/s-based flexible-bitrate networks are effective for cutting the total number of pieces of equipment and could be effective for reducing network cost and power consumption depending on the transmission reach of the 400-Gb/s signal in the case of a relatively small-scale network.

We describe wavelength-routed switching technology for 25-Gbit/s optical packets using a tunable transmitter that monolithically integrates a parallel-ring-resonator tunable laser and an InGaAlAs electro-absorption modulator (EAM). The transmitter provided accurate wavelength tunability with 100-GHz spacing and small output power variation. A 25-Gbit/s burst-mode optical-packet data was encoded onto the laser output by modulating the integrated EAM with a constant voltage swing of 2 V at 45$^{circ}$C. Clear eye openings were observed at the output of the 100 GHz-spaced arrayed-waveguide grating with error-free operation being achieved for all packets. The tunable transmitter is very promising for realizing a high-speed, large-port-count and energy-efficient wavelength-routing switch that enables the forwarding of 100-Gbit/s optical packets.

Electromagnetic scattering problems of canonical 2D structures can be analyzed with a high degree of accuracy by using the point matching method with mode expansion. In this paper, we will extend our previous method to 3D electromagnetic scattering problems and investigate the radar cross section of spherical shells and the computational accuracy.

We fabricated high-quality domain-inverted MgO: LiNbO$_3$ structures with 3.0 and 2.0~$mu$m periods using applying votage to the corrugation electrode. We found that keeping the crystal temperature at 150$^{circ}$C for 12 hours before applying voltage was effective for obtaining good uniformity. We also demonstrated an application of the structures with 3.0~$mu$m period to electro-optic Bragg deflection modulator for the first time.