It is well known that satellite communications systems are effective and essential communication infrastructure for disaster relief. NICT sent researchers to Tsunami stricken area in March right after the Great East Japan Earthquake and provided broadband satellite communications link to support rescue activities. Through this experience, we learned many kinds of requirements of communications for such purposes. In this paper, we list up the requirements and report what kind of satellite communications technologies are needed, and research and development issues.

In this paper, a capacitive-cross-coupling common-gate (CCC-CG) LNA using capacitive feedback is proposed to improve the noise figure (NF). In the conventional CCC-CG LNA, the transconductance gm is determined by the input-matching condition while a lager gm is required to improve NF. gm of the proposed LNA can be increased and NF can be improved by using the added capacitive feedback. The analytical calculation shows that the proposed LNA can perform better than the conventional CCC-CG LNA. In the measurement results using a 0.18-µm CMOS technology, the gain is 10.4–13.4 dB, NF is 2.7–2.9 dB at 0.8–1.8 GHz, and IIP3 is -7 dBm at 0.8 GHz. The power consumption is 6.5 mW with a 1.8-V supply.

One of promising application offered by implant body area networks (BANs) is a capsule endoscope localization system. To begin with, this paper performs finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations on implant BAN propagation with a numerical human model, and investigates the propagation characteristics of implant BAN signals at 400 MHz medical implant communication service (MICS) band. Then, the paper presents a capsule endoscope localization system which utilizes only received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and two estimation methods, such as a maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method and a least squares (LS) method. Furthermore, we evaluate the two localization methods by two computer simulation scenarios. Our computer simulation results demonstrate that the ML localization can improve the location estimation accuracy as compared with the LS localization, that is, our performance comparison reveals that a careful consideration the propagation characteristics of implant BANs signals is efficient in terms of estimation performance improvement in capsule endoscope localization.

Various information and communication technology (ICT) applications have been introduced for use in disaster-stricken areas. Of these, those for healthcare purposes proved useful when used for continually monitoring health conditions and easily using medical and healthcare devices, such as sphygmomanometers, which are familiar to the public. Devices that were easy to understand and use were more acceptable in the first post-disaster stage in a temporary housing community as victims were experiencing mental and physical trauma. After gaining the trust of medical/healthcare staff caring for the victims, we could move to the next stage with their support. ICT technologies are tools and are basically invisible to victims; a notion we have recognized anew. This paper introduces our activities in the area of healthcare monitoring services. The UMe-1 system and subset health check kiosk version 0 are introduced. The kiosk is simple and important for life support advisers in support centers as a tool for checking the health condition of residents. Not all those living in the target temporary housing community are currently using the kiosk due to its location within the widespread premises, but the director of a support center recognizes the utility of the kiosk and expects that a community-based kiosk and user-friendly BAN device could be used at home for mimamori (the Japanese concept of informally monitoring healthcare) because residents living far from support centers have difficulty regularly visiting the center, especially in the winter. We introduced a television-based, in-home health check kiosk and are currently working on its development. There are gaps between actually deployable technologies and research results, but it is also important to continue to address research issues concerning reducing impact through the user interface and introducing less stress to the everyday lives of disaster victims.

In this note, we introduce the integral term of system outputs into an output feedback controller for sampled-data linear systems with unknown disturbances. The proposed method does not use any observer and can prevent the high gain actions in control inputs. Provided the variation of the disturbance in the two consecutive sampling instances is not changed significantly, it is shown that system states and system outputs are finally constrained in small bounded regions, respectively. Simulation results support the theoretical developments.

This paper aims at channel modeling and bit error rate (BER) performance improvement with diversity reception for in-body to on-body ultra wideband (UWB) communication for capsule endoscope application. The channel characteristics are firstly extracted from 3.4 to 4.8 GHz by using finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations incorporated with an anatomical human body model, and then a two-path impulse response channel model is proposed. Based on the two-path channel model, a spatial diversity reception technique is applied to improve the communication performance. Since the received signal power at each receiver location follows a lognormal distribution after summing the two path components, we investigate two methods to approximate the lognormal sum distribution in the combined diversity channel. As a result, the method matching a short Gauss-Hermite approximation of the moment generating function (MGF) of the lognormal sum with that of a lognormal distribution exhibits high accuracy and flexibility. With the derived probability density function (PDF) for the combined diversity signals, the average BER performances for impulse-radio (IR) UWB with non-coherent detection are investigated to clarify the diversity effect by both theoretical analysis and computer simulation. The results realize an improvement around 10 dB on Eb/No at BER of 10-3 for two-branch diversity reception.

We propose a novel dynamic hierarchical optical path network architecture that achieves efficient optical fast circuit switching. In order to complete wavelength path setup/teardown efficiently, the proposed network adaptively manages waveband paths and bundles of optical paths, which provide virtual mesh connectivity between node pairs for wavelength paths. Numerical experiments show that operational and facility costs are significantly reduced by employing the adaptive virtual waveband connections.

In this letter, a timing synchronization scheme is proposed for cooperative WBAN which can be utilized in wireless medical telemetry systems. The approach efficiently exploits the cyclic structure of a presented preamble in order to effectively separate the superposition of cooperative signals. Then, each timing-offset and each channel parameter are estimated in the separated signal. The proposed scheme effectively recovers the original data based on the timing-offset estimates and the channel estimates. The simulation results reveal the excellent performance of the suggested method in terms of MSE and PER.

We propose a new configuration for a parallel fiber amplifier that can amplify both the C- and L-bands simultaneously by employing bundled Er3+-doped fiber (EDF). The bundled EDF is a candidate amplification medium for multi-core optical fiber amplifiers. Our parallel fiber amplifier is another application of the multi-core amplification medium. The amplifier achieves almost the same signal gain of 20 dB for both the C- and L-bands by using a bundled EDF, which is realized by bundling seven identical single-core EDFs.

Recently, network coding has been applied to reliable multicast in wireless networks for packet loss recovery, resulting in significant bandwidth savings. In network-coding-based multicast schemes, once a receiver receives one packet from the source it sends an ACK to acknowledge packet receipt. Such acknowledgment mechanism has the following limitation: when an ACK from one receiver is lost, the source considers the corresponding packet to be lost at this receiver and then conducts unnecessary retransmission. Motivated by this basic observation, we first propose a block-based acknowledgment mechanism, where an ACK now acknowledges all previously received packets in the current block such that the later received ACKs can offset the loss of previous ACKs. To reduce the total amount of feedback overhead, we further propose a more simple feedback mechanism, in which the receivers only start to send acknowledgments from the last two packets (not from the first one as in the first mechanism) of the current block. The first mechanism has the potential to achieve better performance over the latter one in wireless networks with long deep fades (i.e., continuous packet losses) due to its continuous transmissions of ACKs, while the second one is more promising for wireless networks with only random packet losses due to its smaller amount of feedback. Both theoretical and simulation results demonstrate that, compared to the current acknowledgment mechanism in network-coding-based reliable multicast schemes, these two mechanisms can achieve much higher bandwidth efficiency.

A wideband beamformer with mainlobe control is proposed. To make the beamformer robust against pointing errors, inequality rather than equality constraints are used to restrict the mainlobe response, thus more degrees of freedom are saved. The constraints involved are nonconvex, therefore are linearly approximated so that the beamformer can be obtained by iterating a second-order cone program. Moreover, the response variance element is introduced to achieve a frequency invariant beamwidth. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by numerical examples.

Ground antennas are suitable for use in mobile electronic devices due to their compactness. These ground antennas incorporate two capacitors for controlling the resonance frequency and a shorting loop for impedance matching. In this work, we compare the performance of a ground antenna with that of a meandered inverted-F antenna (IFA). It is numerically and experimentally shown that a ground antenna can yield simultaneous improvements in both the antenna size and radiation efficiency when compared to the meandered IFA. The bandwidth of the ground antenna for a voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) of 3:1 is 240 MHz from 2350 MHz to 2590 MHz, while the minimum total antenna efficiency is 62% within the 2.4 GHz ISM band.

A novel long-term sub-band entropy (LT-SubEntropy) measure, which uses improved long-term spectral analysis and sub-band entropy, is proposed for voice activity detection (VAD). Based on the measure, we can accurately exploit the inherent nature of the formant structure on speech spectrogram (the well-known as voiceprint). Results show that the proposed VAD is superior to existing standard VAD methods at low SNR levels, especially at variable-level noise.

The impact and benefits of infrastructure support are shown by introducing an achievable throughput scaling law of a ultra-wide band (UWB) ad hoc network in which m base stations (BSs) are regularly located. The existing multi-hop scheme consisting of two variants, with and without BS help, is utilized with a slight modification. Our result indicates that the derived throughput scaling depends on the path-loss exponent due to the power-limited characteristics for all operating regimes examined. Furthermore, it is shown that the total throughput scales linearly with parameter m as m is larger than a certain level. It thus turns out the use of infrastructure is also helpful in improving the throughput scaling of UWB networks in some conditions.

3 dB bandwidth enhancement of single mode semiconductor lasers is confirmed numerically and experimentally when they are operated by intensity modulated signal light injection. 3 dB bandwidth is enlarged to 2.5 times of resonant frequency. The numerical analysis of rate equations predicts that the bandwidth enhancement is accomplished by the modal gain control of semiconductor lasers with injected intensity modulated signal light through non-linear gain coefficient term.

This study compares the performances of waveband protection and wavelength path protection in survivable hierarchical optical path networks. Network costs and the number of switching operations necessary are evaluated for different ratios of protected demand. Numerical results demonstrate that waveband protection can drastically decrease the number of switching operations in the case of failure, while both waveband and wavelength path protection effectively reduce the network resources needed compared to single layer optical path networks.

This letter proposes a monopole multi-sector antenna with dielectric cylinder, and shows some results of simulations that examined the antenna characteristics. The dependency of radiation characteristics on relative permittivity εr shows the lens effect with increase of εr. Furthermore, the characteristics of the proposed antenna are improved by optimizing the termination conditions at the quiescent antennas. The backlobe level is lower than -10 dB. Also, the vertical HPBW and the conical HPBW are around 70.5° and 63.4°, respectively. The optimization improved the actual gain by 2 dB. It is found that the diameter of the proposed antenna is 1/3rd that of the conventional one.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has attracted much attention recently due to its high data rate and low emission power. Its media access control (MAC) protocol, WiMedia MAC, promises a lot of facilities for high-speed and high-quality wireless communication. However, these benefits in turn involve a large amount of computational load, which challenges the traditional uniprocessor architecture based implementation method to provide the required performance. However, the constrained cost and power budget, on the other hand, makes using commercial multiprocessor solutions unrealistic. In this paper, a low-cost and energy-efficient multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC), which tackles at once the aspects of system design, software migration and hardware architecture, is presented for the implementation of UWB MAC layer. Experimental results show that the proposed MPSoC, based on four simple RISC processors and shared-memory infrastructure, achieves up to 45% performance improvement and 65% power saving, but takes 15% less area than the uniprocessor implementation.

High output power AlGaN/GaN metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) hetero-junction field effect transistor (HFET) on Si substrate for millimeter-wave application has developed. High temperature chemical vapor deposition (HT-CVD) grown SiN as a gate insulator improves the breakdown characteristics which enables the operation at high drain voltage of 55 V. The device exhibits high drain current of 1.1 A/mm free from the current collapse and high RF gain of 10.4 dB. The amplifier module developed AlGaN/GaN MIS-HFET with the gate width of 5.4 mm exhibits an output power of 10.7 W and a linear gain of 4 dB at 26.5 GHz. The resultant high output power is very promising for long-distance communication at millimeter-wave in the future which would enable high speed and high density data transmission.

In this letter, a post-detection signal to noise ratio (SNR) is considered for transmit antenna selection, when a sorted QR decomposition (SQRD) algorithm is used for signal detection in spatial multiplexing (SM) ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple input multiple output systems. The post-detection SNR expression is obtained using a QR factorization algorithm based on a sorted Gram-Schmidt process. The employed antenna selection criterion is to utilize the largest minimum post-detection SNR value. It is shown via simulations that the antenna selection significantly enhances the BER performance of the SQRD-based SM UWB systems on a log-normal multipath fading channel.