We propose a new cognitive radio network architecture using the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) functionality. We implement the cognitive radio network entities standardized in IEEE 1900.4 on the IMS that exchanges RAN and terminal context information between the networks and the terminals to make optimum and immediate reconfiguration decisions. In our proposed architecture, RAN context information is obtained from cellular networks which are directly connected to the IMS. The presence management functions of the IMS are applied to exchange those information in a “push” manner, which enables immediate notification of changes in wireless environment. We evaluate the performance of the proposed context information exchange method, by comparing with the cases that adequate and immediate RAN context information is not available. The evaluation results show that the proposed framework gives 10–30% superior performance than the conventional cognitive radio networks.

A Drude-critical points (D-CP) model for considering metal dispersion is newly incorporated into the frequency-dependent FDTD method using the simple trapezoidal recursive convolution (TRC) technique. Numerical accuracy is investigated through the analysis of pulse propagation in a metal (aluminum) cladding waveguide. The TRC technique with a single convolution integral is found to provide higher accuracy, when compared with the recursive convolution counterpart. The methodology is also extended to the unconditionally stable FDTD based on the locally one-dimensional scheme for efficient frequency-dependent calculations.

In recent wireless communication systems, security is ensured mainly in the upper-layer techniques such as a password or a cryptography processing. However, security needs not be restricted to the upper-layer and the addition of physical-layer security also would yield a much more robust system. Therefore, in this paper, we exploit chaos communication and propose a chaos multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme which achieves physical-layer security and additional channel-coding gain. A chaotic modulation symbol is multiplied to the data to be transmitted at each MIMO antenna to exploit the MIMO antenna diversity, and at the receiver, the joint MIMO detection and chaos decoding is done by maximum likelihood decoding (MLD). The conventional chaos modulation suffers from bit error rate (BER) performance degradation, while the coding gain is obtained in the proposed scheme by the chaos modulation in MIMO. We evaluate the performances of the proposed scheme by an analysis and computer simulations.

Large-scale adoption of electronic healthcare applications requires semantic interoperability. The new proposals propose an advanced (multi-level) DBMS architecture for repository services for health records of patients. These also require query interfaces at multiple levels and at the level of semi-skilled users. In this regard, a high-level user interface for querying the new form of standardized Electronic Health Records system has been examined in this study. It proposes a step-by-step graphical query interface to allow semi-skilled users to write queries. Its aim is to decrease user effort and communication ambiguities, and increase user friendliness.

When a graph can be decomposed into components of well-connected subgraphs, it is possible to speed up random walks by taking advantage of topology of the graph. In this paper, a modified Metropolis random walk scheme is introduced and conditions are given when it performs better than the original Metropolis algorithm.

The general method for estimating phrase translation probabilities consists of sequential processes: word alignment, phrase pair extraction, and phrase translation probability calculation. However, during this sequential process, errors may propagate from the word alignment step through the translation probability calculation step. In this paper, we propose a new method for estimating phrase translation probabilities that reduce the effects of error propagation. By considering the semantic recoverability of phrase retranslation, our method identifies incorrect phrase pairs that have propagated from alignment errors. Furthermore, we define retranslation similarity which represents the semantic recoverability of phrase retranslation, and use this when computing translation probabilities. Experimental results show that the proposed phrase translation estimation method effectively prevents a PBSMT system from selecting incorrect phrase pairs, and consistently improves the translation quality in various language pairs.

This work examines energy trajectory and voice quality measurements, in addition to conventional formant and duration properties, to classify tense and lax vowels in English. Tense and lax vowels are produced with differing articulatory configurations which can be identified by measuring acoustic cues such as energy peak location, energy convexity, open quotient and spectral tilt. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) is conducted, and dialect effects are observed. An overall 85.2% classification rate is obtained using the proposed features on the TIMIT database, resulting in improvement over using only conventional acoustic features. Adding the proposed features to widely used cepstral features also results in improved classification.

In the task of face recognition, a challenging issue is the one sample problem, namely, there is only one training sample per person. Principal component analysis (PCA) seeks a low-dimensional representation that maximizes the global scatter of the training samples, and thus is suitable for one sample problem. However, standard PCA is sensitive to the outliers and emphasizes more on the relatively distant sample pairs, which implies that the close samples belonging to different classes tend to be merged together. In this paper, we propose two-stage block-based whitened PCA (TS-BWPCA) to address this problem. For a specific probe image, in the first stage, we seek the K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NNs) in the whitened PCA space and thus exclude most of samples which are distant to the probe. In the second stage, we maximize the “local” scatter by performing whitened PCA on the K nearest samples, which could explore the most discriminative information for similar classes. Moreover, block-based scheme is incorporated to address the small sample problem. This two-stage process is actually a coarse-to-fine scheme that can maximize both global and local scatter, and thus overcomes the aforementioned shortcomings of PCA. Experimental results on FERET face database show that our proposed algorithm is better than several representative approaches.

The emergence of new services in the cloud computing era has made smooth service migration an important issue in access networks. However, different types of equipment are typically used for the different services due to differences in service requirements. This leads to an increase in not only capital expenditures but also operational expenditures. Here we propose using a service adaptive approach as a solution to this problem. We analyze the requirements of a future access network in terms of service, network, and node. We discuss available access network technologies including the passive optical network, single star network. Finally, we present a future service adaptive access/aggregation network and its architecture along with a programmable optical line terminal and optical network unit, discuss its benefit, and describe example services that it would support.

Axial and transverse magnetic fields are widely used in many kinds of switches to decrease the arc erosion. In this paper, the influence of these two kinds of magnetic fields on the arc phase transition was studied particularly for AgSnO2 contacts breaking a 28 V/25 A circuit. The experiments were carried out under resistive and inductive loads in an atmospheric environment. The relationships between flux densities ranging from 0 to 200 mT and the arc duration were obtained. It was found that the transverse magnetic field was more efficient in balancing the arc phases and decreasing the arc erosion. The results can be used to guide the design of arc extinguishment systems in DC high power relays.

To realize economical optical burst signal receivers for the Optical Network Unit (ONU) of the Ethernet Optical Switched Access Network (E-OSAN), we previously implemented optical burst receivers with AC-coupling and DC-coupling using off-the-shelf components, and showed that the former offers better performance. This paper proposes a new optical burst signal receiver that uses the transfer function, Gn(s) = 1-Hn(s), where Hn(s) denotes a Bessel filter transfer function of order n. We also present a method for designing the proposed receiver and clarify that it has better performance than the conventional AC-coupling one. We then present an LCR circuit synthesis of Gn(s), which is necessary to actually implement a burst receiver based on the proposal.

This paper presents recent progress made in the development of an optical packet and circuit integrated network. From the viewpoint of end users, this is a single network that provides both high-speed, inexpensive services and deterministic-delay, low-data-loss services according to the users' usage scenario. From the viewpoint of network service providers, this network provides large switching capacity with low energy requirements, high flexibility, and efficient resource utilization with a simple control mechanism. The network we describe here will contribute to diversification of services, enhanced functional flexibility, and efficient energy consumption, which are included in the twelve design goals of Future Networks announced by ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector). We examine the waveband-based network architecture of the optical packet and circuit integrated network. Use of multi-wavelength optical packet increases the switch throughput while minimizing energy consumption. A rank accounting method provides a solution to the problem of inter-domain signaling for end-to-end lightpath establishment. Moving boundary control for packet and circuit services makes for efficient resource utilization. We also describe related advanced technologies such as waveband switching, elastic lightpaths, automatic locator numbering assignment, and biologically-inspired control of optical integrated network.

Link prediction in social networks, such as friendship networks and coauthorship networks, has recently attracted a great deal of attention. There have been numerous attempts to address the problem of link prediction through diverse approaches. In the present paper, we focus on the temporal behavior of the link strength, particularly the relationship between the time stamps of interactions or links and the temporal behavior of link strength and how link strength affects future link evolution. Most previous studies have not sufficiently discussed either the impact of time stamps of the interactions or time stamps of the links on link evolution. The gap between the current time and the time stamps of the interactions or links is also important to link evolution. In the present paper, we introduce a new time-aware feature, referred to as time score, that captures the important aspects of time stamps of interactions and the temporality of the link strengths. We also analyze the effectiveness of time score with different parameter settings for different network data sets. The results of the analysis revealed that the time score was sensitive to different networks and different time measures. We applied time score to two social network data sets, namely, Facebook friendship network data set and a coauthorship network data set. The results revealed a significant improvement in predicting future links.

Optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) is a promising technique for multimedia transmission in fiber-optic local-area networks (LANs). Variable-weight optical orthogonal codes (OOCs) can be used for OCDMA networks supporting multiple quality of services (QoS). Most constructions for optimal variable-weight OOCs have focused on the case where the number of distinct Hamming weights of all codewords is equal to two, and the codewords of weight 3 are normally included. In this letter, four explicit constructions of optimal (υ,{4,5,6},1,Q)-OOCs are presented, and more new optimal (υ,{4,5,6},1,Q)-OOCs are obtained via recursive constructions. These improve the existing results on optimal variable-weight OOCs with at least three distinct Hamming weights and minimum Hamming weight 4.

In this paper, we propose a speech enhancement algorithm by using MAP estimation with variable speech spectral amplitude probability density function (speech PDF). The variable speech PDF has two adaptive shape parameters which affect the quality of enhanced speech. Noise can be efficiently suppressed when these parameters are properly applied so that the variable speech PDF shape fits to the real-speech PDF one. We derive adaptive shape parameters from real-speech PDF in various narrow SNR intervals. The proposed speech enhancement algorithm with adaptive shape parameters is examined and compared to conventional algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed method improved SegSNR around 6 and 9 dB when the input speech signal was corrupted by white and tunnel noises at 0 dB, respectively.

In recent years, wireless communication technology has been studied intensively. In particular, MIMO which employs several transmit and receive antennas is a key technology for enhancing spectral efficiency. However, conventional MIMO architectures require some transceiver circuits for the sake of transmitting and receiving separate signals, which incurs the cost of one RF front-end per antenna. In addition to that, MIMO systems are assumed to be used in low spatial correlation environment between antennas. Since a short distance between each antenna causes high spatial correlation and coupling effect, it is difficult to miniaturize wireless terminals for mobile use. This paper shows a novel architecture which enables mobile terminals to be miniaturized and to work with a single RF front-end by means of adaptive analog beam-forming with parasitic antenna elements and antenna switching for spatial multiplexing. Furthermore, statistical analysis of the proposed architecture is also discussed in this paper.

As a result of the rapid development of the Internet in recent years, network security has become an urgent issue. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are one of the most serious security issues. In particular, 60 percent of the DDoS attacks found on the Internet are TCP attacks, including SYN flood attacks. In this paper, we propose adaptive timer-based countermeasures against SYN flood attacks. Our proposal utilizes the concept of soft-state protocols that are widely used for resource management on the Internet. In order to avoid deadlock, a server releases resources using a time-out mechanism without any explicit requests from its clients. If we change the value of the timer in accordance with the network conditions, we can add more flexibility to the soft-state protocols. The timer is used to manage the resources assigned to half-open connections in a TCP 3-way handshake mechanism, and its value is determined adaptively according to the network conditions. In addition, we report our simulation results to show the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper proposes an efficient list extension algorithm for soft-output multiple-input-multiple-output (soft-MIMO) detection. This algorithm extends the list of candidate vectors based on the vector selected by initial detection, in order to solve the empty-set problem, while reducing the number of additional vectors. The additional vectors are obtained from multiple detection orders, from which high-quality soft-output can be generated. Furthermore, a method to reduce the complexity of the determination of the multiple detection orders is described. From simulation results for a 44 system with 16- and 64-quadrature amplitude modulations (QAM) and rate 1/2 and 5/6 duo-binary convolutional turbo code (CTC), the soft-MIMO detection to which the proposed list extension was applied showed a performance degradation of less than 0.5 dB at bit error rate (BER) of 10-5, compared to that of the soft-output maximum-likelihood detection (soft-MLD) for all code rate and modulation pairs, while the complexity of the proposed list extension was approximately 38% and 17% of that of an existing algorithm with similar performance in a 44 system using 16- and 64-QAM, respectively.

In this paper, we investigate two improved turbo receivers for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) uplink in the presence of transmitter (Tx) in-phase and quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI) with parameters known at eNodeB. For multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems, we derive a optimal joint linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) turbo multiuser detector (MUD) based on the mirror symmetry clusters. For the single use SC-FDMA system with Tx IQI, we derive an optimal widely linear MMSE (WLMMSE) turbo equalizer. Both receivers are implemented in the discrete frequency domain and only slightly increase the computational complexity compared to the conventional turbo receivers. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed receivers significantly outperform the conventional turbo receivers. The simulation results are then confirmed by the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis.

In the present paper, we consider fully asynchronous parallelism in membrane computing, and propose two asynchronous P systems for the satisfiability (SAT) and Hamiltonian cycle problem. We first propose an asynchronous P system that solves SAT with n variables and m clauses, and show that the proposed P system computes SAT in O(mn2n) sequential steps or O(mn) parallel steps using O(mn) kinds of objects. We next propose an asynchronous P system that solves the Hamiltonian cycle problem with n nodes, and show that the proposed P system computes the problem in O(n!) sequential steps or O(n2) parallel steps using O(n2) kinds of objects.