The optimistic analytical results for performance analysis of buffered banyan networks are mainly due to certain independence assumptions used for simplifying analysis. To capture more effects of cell correlation, a refined analytical model for both single-buffered and multiple buffered banyan networks is proposed in this paper. When cell output contention occurs at a 2 2 switch element, two contention resolution schemes are used. One is based on randomly choosing the winning cell and another is to give priority to the cell which has been delayed in the current buffer for at least one stage cycle. The switch throughput, cell transfer delay and cell delay deviation for single-buffered banyan networks with and without using priority scheme are derived. Then the model is generalized to multiple buffered banyan networks where analytical expressions for throughput and delay are obtained. We show that using the priority scheme the cell delay deviation is reduced and the influence on throughput performance is insignificant. The results obtained from our analytical model are compared with the simulations and good agreement is observed. Comparisons with some proposed analytical models in the literature reveal that our model is more accurate and powerful in predicting the performance of buffered banyan networks.

This paper surveys recent research activities on three major areas of digital media information base, namely, video database systems as a typical example of temporal application, database systems for mixed reality as an instance of spatial application, and kansei management for digital media retrieval as a case of humanistic feelings application. Current research results by the project Advanced Database Systems for Integration of Media and User Environments are reported.

In geographical databases for navigation, users raise various types of queries concerning route guidance. The most fundamental query is a shortest-route query, but, as dynamical traffic information newly becomes available and the static geographical database of roads itself has grown up further, more flexible queries are required to realize a user-friendly interface meeting the current settings. One important query among them is a detour query which provides information about detours, say listing several candidates for useful detours. This paper first reviews algorithms for the shortest and k shortest paths, and discusses their extensions to detour queries. Algorithms for finding a realistic detour are given. The efficiency and property of the algorithms are examined through experiments on an actual road network.

Decision trees are used as a convenient means to explain given positive examples and negative examples, which is a form of data mining and knowledge discovery. Standard methods such as ID3 may provide non-monotonic decision trees in the sense that data with larger values in all attributes are sometimes classified into a class with a smaller output value. (In the case of binary data, this is equivalent to saying that the discriminant Boolean function that the decision tree represents is not positive. ) A motivation of this study comes from an observation that real world data are often positive, and in such cases it is natural to build decision trees which represent positive (i. e. , monotone) discriminant functions. For this, we propose how to modify the existing procedures such as ID3, so that the resulting decision tree represents a positive discriminant function. In this procedure, we add some new data to recover the positivity of data, which the original data had but was lost in the process of decomposing data sets by such methods as ID3. To compare the performance of our method with existing methods, we test (1) positive data, which are randomly generated from a hidden positive Boolean function after adding dummy attributes, and (2) breast cancer data as an example of the real-world data. The experimental results on (1) tell that, although the sizes of positive decision trees are relatively larger than those without positivity assumption, positive decision trees exhibit higher accuracy and tend to choose correct attributes, on which the hidden positive Boolean function is defined. For the breast cancer data set, we also observe a similar tendency; i. e. , positive decision trees are larger but give higher accuracy.

Adaptive maximum likelihood differential detection implemented by a reduced state-transition Viterbi algorithm (called adaptive 3-state RSTVDD) is presented for adaptive reception of M-ary differential phase shift keying (DPSK) signals transmitted over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and frequency-nonselective Rayleigh fading channels. The adaptive 3-state RSTVDD comprises 1DD, a differential encoder, and reverse modulator, followed by reduced-state (3-state) Viterbi DD (RSVDD) with adaptive phase reference estimation. The adaptive 3-state RSVDD detector estimates the sequence of phase errors of the 1DD output. The phase reference estimator is an adaptive least mean square (LMS) filter with a step-size that adapts to changing channel conditions. The final detected symbol sequence is the modulo-2π sum of the 1DD output phase sequence and the detected phase error sequence. The bit error rate (BER) performance of M-ary DPSK, M=4, 8, and 16, in the AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels is evaluated by computer simulation to show that adaptive 3-state RSTVDD can achieve almost the same BER performance as the previously developed adaptive M-state RSVDD. Since the number of trellis states is reduced to three irrespective of M, the adaptive 3-state RSTVDD has lower computation complexity and it is particularly useful for M-ary DPSK with M8.

Digital logic frequency detector whose operation is based on the analog quadricorrelator is presented. Proposed circuit consists of conventional digital logic devices without an alog elements. Therefore, it has superior reliabilities over component drifts or aging effects. Frequency linear discrimination range is 100% of the reference clock rate.

We developed a PC cluster system which consists of 100 PCs as a test bed for massively parallel query processing. Each PC employs the 200 MHz Pentium Pro CPU and is connected with others through an ATM switch. Because the query processing applications are insensitive to the communication latency and mainly perform integer operations, the ATM connected PC cluster approach can be considered a reasonable solution for high performance database servers with low costs. However, there has been no challenge to construct large scale PC clusters for database applications, as far as the authors know. Though we employed commodity components as much as possible, we developed the DBMS itself, because that was a key component for obtaining high performance in parallel query processing, and there seemed no system which could meet our demand. On each PC node, a server program which acts as a database kernel is running to process the queries in cooperation with other nodes. The kernel was designed to execute pipelined operators and handle voluminous data efficiently, to achieve high performance on complex decision support type queries. We used the standard benchmark, TPC-D, on a 100 GB database to verify the feasibility of our approach, through comparison of our system with commercial parallel systems. As a whole, our system exhibited sufficiently high performance which was competitive with the current TPC-D top records, in spite of not using indices. For some heavy queries in the benchmark, which have high selectivity and joinability, our system performed much better. In addition, we applied transposed file organization to the database for further performance improvement. The transposed file organization vertically partitions the tuples, enabling attribute-by-attribute access to the relations. This resulted in significant performance improvement by reducing the amount of disk I/O and shifting the bottleneck to computation.

Extremely small aperture radial line slot antennas (RLSAs) are analyzed by method of moments. At first, the analysis model of cylindrical waveguide in terms of rectangular cavity modes is confirmed for a RLSA with a spiral slot arrangement. The overall VSWR as well as rotational symmetry of the actual structure of RLSAs is predicted for the first time and is confirmed experimentally. Secondly, the minimum diameter of the concentric array RLSA is estimated for which the conventional analysis model of a rectangular waveguide is valid for the design of matching slot pairs at the shorted periphery of the radial waveguide. It is found that the curvature and cylindrical short wall at aperture periphery must be considered in the design and analysis of small RLSAs with the gain lower than about 25 dBi.

Adaptive infinite impulse response (IIR) digital filter implemented using a cascade of second order direct form allpass filters and a finite impulse response (FIR) filter, has the property of its poles converging to those of the unknown system. In this paper we implement the adaptive allpass-FIR digital filter using a lattice allpass filter with minimum number of multipliers. We then derive a simple adaptive algorithm, which does not increase the overall number of multipliers of the proposed adaptive digital filter (ADF) in comparison to the ADF that uses the direct form allpass filter. The proposed structure and algorithm exhibit a kind of orthogonality, which ensures convergence of the poles of the ADF to those of the unknown system. Simulation results confirm this convergence.

This paper proposes a new cell station (CS) configuration for personal communication systems. The proposed CS employs a modified coherent demodulator with 4-branch maximal ratio combining diversity and a burst-by-burst automatic frequency control (AFC) to enhance the coverage. The proposed CS also employs an antenna-sharing diversity transmission to incorporate more than one transceiver block into a small unit with high power efficiency. With these techniques, the BER performance of the uplink control channel (CCH) is flattened regardless of carrier frequency errors within 12 kHz; the diversity gain of uplink traffic channel (TCH) is improved by 2 dB; the downlink transmission power is reduced by 1.9 dB.

This paper gives an overview of research activities on high performance databases in Japan. It focuses on parallel algorithms for relational databases and data mining, parallel approaches for object-oriented databases, and parallel disk systems. Studies surveyed in this paper are carried out mainly by database researchers in Japanese universities under the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (1996-1998).

This paper proposes a new wireless multimedia communication system based on hierarchical modulation, which gives unequal transmission reliability corresponding to the sensitivity to the transmission errors. In order to achieve high quality multimedia communication in a band-limited and time-variant fading channel, the proposed scheme changes the modulation scheme according to the contents of information. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed system is an effective high-quality and high-speed multimedia transmission technique in fading channel.

In this paper we present two traffic control approaches, a circuit emulation traffic control (CETC) and an adaptive priority traffic control (APTC) for supporting voice services in ATM networks. Most voice services can be handled as CBR traffic, this causes a lot of wasted bandwidth. Sending voice through VBR (variable bit rate) may be a better alternative, because it allows the network to allocate voice bandwidth on demand. In CETC, the service discipline guarantees the quality of service (QOS) for voice circuits. Through mathematical analysis, we show that CETC features an adequate performance in delay-jitter. Moreover, it is feasible in implementation. We also present an APTC approach which uses a dynamic buffer allocation scheme to adjust the buffer size based on the real traffic need, as well as employs an adaptive priority queuing technique to handle various delay requirements for VBR voice traffic. It provides an adequate QOS for voice circuits in addition to improving the multiplexing gain. Simulation results show that voice traffic get satisfied delay performance using our approaches. It may fulfill the emerging needs of voice service over ATM networks.

This paper explores virtual destination (VD)/virtual source (VS)-based available bit rate (ABR) flow control performance, targeting wireless asynchronous transfer mode (WATM) application that can incur long link-delays because of employing radio-medium sharing and/or radio-specific data link control schemes. As this paper reveals, the conventional VD/VS scheme has difficulty in sustaining satisfactory ABR performance, when it is applied to long-delay-causing WATM; it suffers from significant increase in the necessary buffer capacity. To ensure the ABR performance in WATM, this paper proposes a new VD/VS coupling scheme using a feed-forward congestion indication. The proposed scheme controls the allowed cell rate of a source end system in a feed-forward manner by predicting the queue length at the time the WATM-associated-round-trip ahead. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme exhibits excellent ABR performance with a long delay of the divided loop on the radio-link side. It is also verified that the proposed scheme is rather robust against uncertainty and/or time-variation regarding the predetermined radio link delay.

A fractal image coding scheme using classified range regions is proposed. Two classes of range regions, shade and nonshade, are defined here, A shade range region is encoded by the average gray level, while a nonshade range region is encoded by IFS parameters. To obtain classified range regions, the two-stage block merging scheme is proposed. Each range region is produced by merging primitive square blocks. Shade range regions are obtained at the first stage, and from the rest of primitive blocks nonshade range regions are obtained at the second stage. Furthermore, for increasing the variety of region shape, the 8-directional block merging scheme is defined by extension of the 4-directional scheme. Also, two similar schemes for encoding region shapes, each corresponding to the 4-directional block merging scheme and the 8-directional block merging scheme, are proposed. From the results of simulation by using a test image, it was demonstrated that the variety of region shape allows large shade range regions to be extracted efficiently, and these large shade range regions are more effective in reduction of total amount of codebits with less increase of degradation of reconstructed image quality than large nonshade range regions. The 8-directional merging and coding scheme and the 4-directional scheme reveal almost the same coding performance, which is improved than that of the quad-tree partitioning scheme. Also, these two schemes achieve almost the same reconstructed image quality.

In this paper, we present an analysis of the microstrip lines whose strip conductors are of various cross-sections, such as rectangular cross-section, triangle cross-section, and half-cycle cross-section. The method employed is the boundary integral equation method (BIEM). Numerical results for these microstrip lines demonstrate various shape effects of the strip conductor on the characteristics of lines. The processing technique on the convergence of the Green's function is also described.

A thin-film waveguide amplifier based on Er-doped Garnet crystals is proposed and transient amplification characteristics, studied numerically using time-dependent rate equations and mode evolution equations, are presented. The potential of the amplifier for integration with active devices operating at the present communication wavelength of 1. 53 µm band is revealed. Pump wavelengths in the visible and near infrared lead to excited state absorption, and will affect the gain characteristics, which has been included in the present study. Steady state response of the Er doped Garnet crystal waveguide amplifiers has been analyzed in order to optimize the gain characteristics, which are further used in the dynamic response analysis. Accordingly, it is shown that a high gain of 20 dB/cm is possible to be achieved. Experimentally determined parameters such as waveguide loss, absorption and emission cross-sections have been used for the simulations. Comparisons of the present simulation results with our earlier reported results of quasi-two-level laser model and other reported results are also presented. Understanding the dynamic characteristics of the integrated optic waveguide amplifiers is necessary when the input signal is modulated in various formats. Because of the slower gain dynamics of the Er doped Garnet amplifier medium, it is shown that the longer signal input pulses are observed to be distorted upon amplification. Very short single pulse of nano- and pico-second duration are amplified without change in the pulse shape. Input pulses of square, Gaussian and Lorentzian shapes have been considered for the numerical examples.

We describe a new multiport memory which is called Shared DRAM (SHDRAM) to overcome bus-bottle neck problem in parallel processor system with shared memory. The processors are directly connected to this SHDRAM without conventional common bus. The test chip with 32 kbit memory cells is fabricated using a 1. 5 µm CMOS technology. The basic operation is confirmed by the circuit simulation and experimental results. In addition, it is confirmed by the computer simulation that the system performance with SHDRAM is superior to that with conventional common buses.

Retrieving the unknown parameters of scattering objects from measured field data is the subject of microwave imaging. This is naturally and usually posed as an optimization problem. In this paper, micro genetic algorithm coupled with deterministic method is applied to the shape reconstruction of perfectly conducting cylinders. The combined approach, with a very small population like the micro genetic algorithm, performs much better than the conventional large population genetic algorithms (GA's) in reaching the optimal region. In addition, we propose a criterion for switching the micro GA to the deterministic optimizer. The micro GA is utilized to effectively locate the vicinity of the global optimum, while the deterministic optimizer is employed to efficiently reach the optimum after inside this region. Therefore, the combined approach converges to the optimum much faster than the micro GA. The proposed approach is first tested by a function optimization problem, then applied to reconstruct perfectly conducting cylinders from both synthetic data and real data. Impressive and satisfactory results are obtained for both cases, which demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

This paper presents a new compound constructive algorithm of neural networks whereby the fuzzy logic technique is explored as an efficient learning algorithm to implement an optimal network construction from an initial simple 3-layer network while the genetic algorithm is used to help design an improved network by evolutions. Numerical simulations on artificial life demonstrate that compared with the existing network design algorithms such as the constructive algorithms, the pruning algorithms and the fixed, static architecture algorithm, the present algorithm, called FuzGa, is efficient in both time complexity and network performance. The improved time complexity comes from the sufficiently small 3 layer design of neural networks and the genetic algorithm adopted partly because the relatively small number of layers facilitates an utilization of an efficient steepest descent method in narrowing down the solution space of fuzzy logic and partly because trappings into local minima can be avoided by genetic algorithm, contributing to considerable saving in time in the processing of network learning and connection. Compared with 54. 8 minutes of MLPs with 65 hidden neurons, 63. 1 minutes of FlexNet or 96. 0 minutes of Pruning, our simulation results on artificial life show that the CPU time of the present method reaching the target fitness value of 100 food elements eaten for the present FuzGa has improved to 42. 3 minutes by SUN's SPARCstation-10 of SuperSPARC 40 MHz machine for example. The role of hidden neurons is elucidated in improving the performance level of the neural networks of the various schemes developed for artificial life applications. The effect of population size on the performance level of the present FuzGa is also elucidated.