Microwave/millimeter-wave phase and amplitude characteristics of the optically controlled phased array antenna with a different SMF for each antenna feed were measured. Suitable phases for the beam steering can be realized by the adjustment of the LD wavelength independently with multiple SMFs. In addition to the phase, amplitude of each antenna feed can be controlled stably using LD current without phase variation. Furthermore, effectiveness of the calibration method of the phased array using multiple SMFs by LD wavelength adjustment is experimentally verified. Excellent microwave/millimeter-wave phase characteristics using 2- and 3-element optically controlled phased array feed were experimentally demonstrated with calibration of the phases. Phase characteristics of the array using multiple SMFs were also compared with that using a single SMF experimentally.

We propose a robust and efficient algorithm called ROCKET for clustering large-scale transaction databases. ROCKET is a divisive hierarchical algorithm that makes the most of recent hardware architecture. ROCKET handles the cases with the small and the large number of similar transaction pairs separately and efficiently. Through experiments, we show that ROCKET achieves high-quality clustering with a dramatic performance improvement.

With Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) involving in diverse applications, the realistic analysis of energy consumption of a sensor node in an error-prone network environment is emerging as an elementary research issue. In this paper, we introduce a Distributed Communication Model (DCM) that can accurately determine the energy consumption through data communication from source to destination in error-prone network environments. The energy consumption is affected with the quality of link, which is characterized by symmetry, directivity, instability, and irregularity of the communication range of a sensor node. Due to weak communication links, significant packet loss occurs that affects the overall energy consumption. While other models unable to determine energy consumption due to lossy links in error-prone and unstable network environments, DCM can accurately estimate the energy consumption in such situations. We also perform comprehensive analysis of overheads caused by data propagation through multi-hop distributed networks. We validate DCM through both simulations and experiments using MICAz motes. Similarity of the results from energy consumption analysis with both simulations and experimentations shows that DCM is realistic, compared to other models in terms of accuracy and diversity of the environments.

WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) has emerged as a promising radio access technology for providing high speed broadband connectivity to subscribers over large geographic regions. New enhancements allow deployments of relay stations (RSs) that can extend the coverage of the base station (BS), increase cell capacity, or both. In this paper, we consider the placement of transparent RSs that maximize the cell capacity. We provide a closed-form approximation for the optimal location of RS inside a cell. A numerical analysis of a number of case studies validates the closed-form approximation. The numerical results show that the closed-form approximation is reasonably accurate.

Break arcs are rotated with the radial magnetic field formed by a magnet embedded in the fixed contact. They are generated in a DC42 V resistive circuit. The circuit current when the contacts are closed varies from 5 A to 21 A. The strength of a radial magnetic field for rotating break arcs changes. Arc duration is investigated. Then rotational frequency, arc length and Lorentz force when the periodic rotation of break arcs starts are analyzed to investigate the conditions required to rotate break arcs. The following results are obtained. The arc length L when the rotational motion of the break arc starts is almost constant at a constant magnetic flux density with an increase in circuit current. The arc length L decreases with an increase in the magnetic flux density of the radial magnetic field. The rotational motion of break arcs starts when the arc length L reaches a certain value determined by magnetic flux density. Rotational frequency and Lorentz force increase linearly with an increase in circuit current.

Recently, photovoltaic power systems and electric vehicles have been commonly used. Therefore, the importance of DC (direct current) switching is expected to increase in the near future. The authors have been examining a method of evaluating the electrode loss of AgNi contacts for an electromagnetic contactor with a medium DC load current at a resistive circuit. In this study, the arc energy and electrode mass changes were investigated in more detail. We carried out experiments of 100,000 operations for an electromagnetic contactor at a load current of 5 A constant with a source voltage change from 100 to 160 V. The arc duration, contact resistance, arc energy, and electrode mass changes were measured. As a result, the arc duration was found out increase with the source voltage. In addition, the stationary cathode mass change (loss) increased proportion only to the total arc energy. However, the stationary cathode loss per unit arc energy decreased at the highest source voltage.

In this letter, coordinated power allocation (PA) is investigated for the downlink of a generalized multi-cluster distributed antenna system (DAS). Motivated by practical applications, we assume only the global large-scale channel state information is known at the transmitter. First, an upper bound (UB) for the ergodic sum capacity of the system is derived and used as a simplified optimization target. Then, a coordinated PA scheme is proposed based on Geometric Programming (GP), which is demonstrated to be nearly optimal by Monte Carlo simulations.

Using a self-developed ASTM test system of contact material electrical properties under low voltage (LV), small-capacity, the current-frequency variable and a photoelectric analytical balance, the electric performance comparison experiments and material weighing of silver-based electrical contact materials, such as silver/tungsten and silver/cadmium oxide contact materials, are completed under LV, pure resistive load and small current at 400 Hz/50 Hz. The surface profiles and constituents of silver/tungsten contact material were observed and analyzed by SEM and EDAX. Researches indicate that the form of the contact material arc burnout at 400 Hz is stasis, not an eddy flow style at 50 Hz; meanwhile, the area of the contact burnout at 400 Hz is less than that of 50 Hz, and the local ablation on the surface layer at 400 Hz is more serious. Comparing the capacities of the silver-based contact materials with different second element such as CAgW50, CAgNi10, CAgC4 and CAgCdO15 at 400 Hz, no matter what the performances of arc erosion resistance or welding resistance, it can be found that the capacities of the silver/tungsten material is the best.

Recently proposed full-rate quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (QSTBCs) with power scaling is able to achieve full-diversity through linearly combining two adequately power scaled orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs). While in our initial work we numerically derived the optimal value of the power scaling factor to achieve full-diversity, our goal in this letter is to analytically derive the optimal power scaling, especially for square lattice constellations (e.g., 4-QAM, 16-QAM, etc.) by maximizing the coding gain.

Cognitive radio is a wireless technology aimed at improving the efficient use of the radio-electric spectrum, thus facilitating a reduction in the load on the free frequency bands. Cognitive radio networks can scan the spectrum and adapt their parameters to operate in the unoccupied bands. To avoid interfering with licensed users operating on a given channel, the networks need to be highly sensitive, which is achieved by using cooperative sensing methods. Current cooperative sensing methods are not robust enough against occasional or continuous attacks. This article outlines a Group Fusion method that takes into account the behaviour of users over the short and long term. On fusing the data, the method is based on giving more weight to user groups that are more unanimous in their decisions. Simulations of a dynamic environment with interference are performed. Results prove that when attackers are present (both reiterative or sporadic), the proposed Group Fusion method has superior sensing capability than other methods.

An Energy-efficient Flexible Beacon Scheduling (EFBS) mechanism is proposed to solve the beacon collision problem in cluster-tree healthcare systems. In EFBS, after clustering, BAN Coordinators perform power control. Then they are divided into groups and each group is assigned one contention-free time-slot. The duration of the beacon-only period is flexible. According to the simulation results, EFBS provides better performance than other beacon scheduling approaches.

In this paper, to clarify the thermal effect of the bridge for long lifetime contacts, the effects of heat conductivity on bridge break at different material contact pairs were discussed experimentally. To examine the relationship between the bridge and material, the electrode materials of the anode and the cathode were chosen as the same and the different material pairs in this experiment. Ag, AgPd60 and Pd were chosen as the electrode materials, because Ag, AgPd60 and Pd had the different thermal diffusivity. Firstly, the voltage waveforms in the bridge with different material pair were compared to the voltage waveform with the same material pair case. Secondary, the effects of heat conductivity on the break of bridge were discussed. In the results, the bridge voltage waveform depends on the electrode material at anode side. The length of the bridge at bridge break depends on the heat conductivity of the electrode material at anode side. This study provides the basic considerations on the thermal condition of the bridge break.

Generally, the failure rate of a sealed relay is regarded as a constant value, no matter where and how it is used. However, the failure processes of sealed relays won't be the same under different conditions, even for one relay, its failure rate also will be changed during operations. This paper studies the failure process of a kind of sealed relay by analyzing the variations of its time parameters. Among contact resistance and all those time parameters, it is found that closing gap time can indicate the failure process of tested relay very well. For the purpose of verifying this conclusion derived from time parameters, the contacts are observed by microscope after the tested relay failed. Both theoretical calculation result of contacts gap and photos taken by microscope show that the hypothetic failure mode derived from time parameters is reasonable. Based on the failure analysis, the paper also proposes a dynamic reliability estimation method with closing gap time.

In this paper, we propose a wideband four-way turnstile-junction waveguide divider/combiner in the Ka-band. The proposed divider/combiner has an insertion loss of less than 0.8 dB over the frequency range of 28–39.5 GHz. A power combiner amplifier using this circuit and four MMIC amplifiers has been demonstrated with 83% combining efficiency at 34.9 GHz. The measured results show that the turnstile-junction waveguide divider-combiner is a suitable element for developing a broadband millimeter-wave spatial power combiner amplifier.

Providing quality-of service (QoS) guarantees in VoIP applications has become an urgent demand in wireless and mobile networks. One of the important issues is to find a simple quality metric fitted to low power mobile devices such as smart phones. This paper considers the gap ratio (the proportion of the accumulated gap periods over the whole call session) as a simple quality metric. Our study aims to find the optimum packet count threshold between two adjacent lost packets (referred to as Gmin in RTCP-XR), which is needed for the purpose of identifying whether the current packet at the receiver belongs to the gap state or the burst state, because quality prediction errors depend on the Gmin value when the gap ratio is used as a simple quality metric. Based on this metric, we propose an accounting model that can be a candidate accounting metric useful for a quality-based accounting mechanism.

Silver electrical contacts are separated to generate break arcs in a DC48 V/6-24 A resistive circuit. The transverse magnetic field formed by a permanent magnet is applied to the break arcs. A series of experiments are carried out for two different experimental conditions. One condition is a constant contact separating speed while the magnetic flux density is changed to investigate the shortening effect of the arc duration. Another condition is a constant magnetic flux density while the contact separating speed is changed to investigate the changes in the arc duration and the contact gap when the break arc is extinguished. As a result, with constant separating speed, it is confirmed that the duration of break arcs is shortened by the transverse magnetic field and the break arcs are extinguished when the arc length reaches a certain value L. Under the condition of constant transverse magnetic field, (i) the arc duration is shortened by increasing the separation speed; (ii) the contact gap when the break arc is extinguished is almost constant when the separating speed v is sufficiently faster than 5 mm/s.

Low drop-out regulators (LDOs) are widely used in the system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. Due to the multi-function and energy saving requirements for mobile applications nowadays, more strict specifications are expected on the developmental roadmap of the LDOs. An output-capacitorless LDO providing fast transient response under the low supply voltage and low quiescent current conditions is proposed in this paper. Provided by the low supply voltage, the proposed LDO adopts cascading technique using the Multipath Nested Miller Compensation (MNMC) to maintain a higher bandwidth for fast transient requirement. In addition, a Transient Quiescent Current Booster (TQCB) is supplemented to the operational amplifier to improve the slew rate for the fast load transient. The TQCB only raises the quiescent current during the load transient instant so that both power saving and the load response improvement could be well achieved. It deserves noting that the proposed TQCB contains only two transistors, which is simple to be implemented compared to the other transient current enhancement techniques. The designed LDO has only 1.6 pF capacitance for the totally added on-chip compensation, and 25.8 µA of current consumption in the main amplifier. The recovery time under the fast load change is less than 3 µs and the stability is guaranteed. Test results from the real implementation of a 0.35 µm CMOS process verify that the designed LDO performs as expected.

This paper addresses the problem of ordering the color SIFT descriptors in the independent component analysis for image classification. Component ordering is of great importance for image classification, since it is the foundation of feature selection. To select distinctive and compact independent components (IC) of the color SIFT descriptors, we propose two ordering approaches based on local variation, named as the localization-based IC ordering and the sparseness-based IC ordering. We evaluate the performance of proposed methods, the conventional IC selection method (global variation based components selection) and original color SIFT descriptors on object and scene databases, and obtain the following two main results. First, the proposed methods are able to obtain acceptable classification results in comparison with original color SIFT descriptors. Second, the highest classification rate can be obtained by using the global selection method in the scene database, while the local ordering methods give the best performance for the object database.

A hybrid overlay/underlay spectrum sharing method for cognitive radio networks based on user classification and convex optimization is proposed. Interference radii are configured for the primary receiver and each cognitive receiver. Cognitive users are divided into four groups and allocated different spectrum sharing patterns according to their distance from the primary transmitter and receiver. An optimal power allocation scheme that achieves the maximum sum rate of cognitive radio system on the premise of satisfying the interference constraint of primary receiver is acquired through the convex optimization method. Performance analysis and simulation results show that, compared with existing methods, our method leads to improved performance of achievable sum rate of cognitive users while guarantees the transmission of primary users.

With energy shortages and global climate change leading our concerns these days, the energy consumption of datacenters has become a key issue. Obviously, a substantial reduction in energy consumption can be made by powering down servers when they are not in use. This paper aims at designing, implementing and evaluating a Green Scheduler for reducing energy consumption of datacenters in Cloud computing platforms. It is composed of four algorithms: prediction, ON/OFF, task scheduling, and evaluation algorithms. The prediction algorithm employs a neural predictor to predict future load demand based on historical demand. According to the prediction, the ON/OFF algorithm dynamically adjusts server allocations to minimize the number of servers running, thus minimizing the energy use at the points of consumption to benefit all other levels. The task scheduling algorithm is responsible for directing request traffic away from powered-down servers and toward active servers. The performance is monitored by the evaluation algorithm to balance the system's adaptability against stability. For evaluation, we perform simulations with two load traces. The results show that the prediction mode, with a combination of dynamic training and dynamic provisioning of 20% additional servers, can reduce energy consumption by 49.8% with a drop rate of 0.02% on one load trace, and a drop rate of 0.16% with an energy consumption reduction of 55.4% on the other. Our method is also proven to have a distinct advantage over its counterparts.