High frequency bands such as the 3-GHz band have received much attention as frequency resources for broadband mobile communication systems. Radio Frequency (RF) integrated antennas are considered to be useful as base station antennas in decreasing the feeding loss that is otherwise inevitable in high frequency bands and they ensure sufficient power for broadband transmission. One problem in actualizing RF integrated antennas is miniaturizing the duplexer, which is generally large, among the RF circuitry components. To downsize the duplexer, we consider separately locating the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) antennas. To suppress further the mutual coupling between the Tx and Rx antennas, we investigate a filter integrated antenna configuration. In this paper, we consider an aperture coupled patch antenna as the base antenna configuration and propose a new filter integrated antenna that comprises multiple rectangular elements installed between the coupling slot and radiation element of the Rx antenna. The simulation and measurement results confirm that the new antenna reduces the mutual coupling in the transmission frequency band up to 5.7 dB compared to the conventional slot coupled patch antenna configuration.

In this paper, a dual-band bandpass filter (BPF) of multilayer suspended stripline (SSL) structure and an SSL diplexer composed of a low-pass filter (LPF) and a high-pass filter (HPF) are proposed. Bandstop structure creating transmission zeros is adopted in the BPF and diplexer, enhancing the signal selectivity of the former and increasing the isolation between the diverting ports of the latter. The dual-band BPF possesses two distinct bandpass structures and a bandstop circuit, all laid on different metallic layers. The metallic layers together with the supporting substrates are vertically stacked up to save the circuit dimension. The LPF and HPF used in the diplexer structure are designed by a quasi-lumped approach, which the LC lumped-elements circuit models are developed to analyze filters' characteristics and to emulate their frequency responses. Half-wavelength resonating slots are employed in the diplexer's structure to increase the isolation between its two signal diverting ports. Experiments are conducted to verify the multilayer dual-band BPF and the diplexer design. Agreements are observed between the simulation and the measurement.

This paper proposes a new three-mode resonator, which consists of a parallel-coupled microstrip line resonator embedded with a slotline resonator, and develops a compact low-loss bandpass filter (BPF) with a sharp roll-off response because of four transmission zeros (TZ) located very near the passband. Resonance mechanism and properties of the three modes are first analyzed by using an eigen-mode analysis, and then an equivalent circuit model is established for expressing a novel coupling scheme of the developed BPF. It is made clear from the results of circuit analysis that the four TZs are produced because of multiple paths between the input/output stub lines formed by the three resonant modes and the direct source/load coupling. The validity of the proposed resonator and filter is supported by the comparison between simulated and measured results.

Recent years, millimeter wave applications for wireless communication have attracted much attention and expected. We focused on an NRD guide and sapphire which have the excellent low loss characteristics in millimeter wave region. In this paper, an NRD guide excited sapphire disk resonator and millimeter wave bandpass filter with narrow bandwidth using proposed resonators were designed and fabricated. As a result, it was realized that the 3-pole bandpass filter with center frequency 58.64 GHz and 3 dB bandwidth 273 MHz. Moreover, its insertion loss was found to be about 1.5 dB.

This paper presents a novel design scheme for a band-switchable multi-band power amplifier (BS-MPA). A key point of the design scheme is configuring multi-section reconfigurable matching networks (MR-MNs) optimally in terms of low loss matching in multiple frequency bands from 0.7 to 2.5 GHz. The MR-MN consists of several matching sections, each of which has a matching block connected to a transmission line via a switch. Power dissipation at an actual on-state switch results in the insertion loss of the MR-MN and depends on how the impedance is transformed by the MR-MN. The proposed design scheme appropriately transforms the impedance of a high power transistor to configure a low loss MR-MN. Numerical analyses show quantitative improvement in the loss using the proposed scheme. A 9-band 3-stage BS-MPA is newly designed following the proposed scheme and fabricated on a multi-layer low temperature co-fired ceramic substrate for compactness. The BS-MPA achieves a gain of over 30 dB, an output power of greater than 33 dBm and a power added efficiency of over 40% at the supply voltage of 4 V in each operating band.

A time-reversal (TR) approach with multiple signal classification (MUSIC) provides super-resolution for detection and localization using multistatic data collected from an array antenna system. The theory of TR-MUSIC assumes that the number of antenna elements is greater than that of scatterers (targets). Furthermore, it requires many sets of frequency-domain data (snapshots) in seriously noisy environments. Unfortunately, these conditions are not practical for real environments due to the restriction of a reasonable antenna structure as well as limited measurement time. We propose an approach that treats both noise reduction and relaxation of the transceiver restriction by using a time-domain gating technique accompanied with the Fourier transform before applying the TR-MUSIC imaging algorithm. Instead of utilizing the conventional multistatic data matrix (MDM), we employ a modified MDM obtained from the gating technique. The resulting imaging functions yield more reliable images with only a few snapshots regardless of the limitation of the antenna arrays.

In order to realize millimeter-wave (MMW) 3-D system-in-package (SiP) front-end modules, we propose a 60-GHz band copper ball vertical interconnection structure, which interconnects between vertically stacked substrates. The structure enables ICs to be placed between the vertically stacked substrates. Since the diameter of the copper balls must exceed the thickness of the ICs, the distance between the substrates in the modules is larger than that of the flip-chip interconnection widely used in the MMW-band. Therefore, the conventional flip-chip interconnection does not scale for the interconnection between the substrates in MMW 3-D SiP front-end modules. The layout of grounded copper balls and the patterns of inner ground layers in the upper/lower substrates are designed using 3-D electromagnetic field simulation. The designed structure allows less than 1 dB transmission loss up to 71.1 GHz, compared with a through transmission line. The result is verified with fabrication and measurement and confirms the feasibility of MMW 3-D SiP front-end modules.

In this paper, a wideband CMOS radio frequency (RF) front-end for digital video broadcasting-handheld (DVB-H) receiver is proposed. The RF front-end circuit is composed of a single-ended resistive feedback low noise amplifier (LNA), a single-to-differential amplifier, an I/Q down-conversion mixer with linearized transconductors employing third order intermodulation distortion cancellation, and a divide-by-two circuit with LO buffers. By employing a third order intermodulation (IMD3) cancellation technique and vertical NPN bipolar junction transistor (BJT) switching pair for an I/Q down-conversion mixer, the proposed RF front-end circuit has high linearity and low low-frequency noise performance. It is fabricated in a 0.18 µm deep n-well CMOS technology and draws 12 mA from a 1.8 V supply voltage. It shows a voltage gain of 31 dB, a noise figure (NF) lower than 2.6 dB, and an IIP3 of -8 dBm from 470 MHz to 862 MHz.

This paper presents the design and implementation of 0.9–4.8 GHz CMOS power amplifier (PA) with improved group delay variation and gain flatness at the same time for UWB transmitters. This PA design employs a two-stage cascade common source topology, a resistive shunt feedback technique and inductive peaking to achieve high gain flatness, and good input matching. Based on theoretical analysis, the main design factor for group delay variation is identified. The measurement results indicate that the proposed PA design has an average gain of 10.2 ± 0.8 dB while maintaining a 3-dB bandwidth of 0.57 to 5.8 GHz, an input return loss |S11| less than -4.4 dB, and an output return loss |S22| less than -9.2 dB over the frequency range of interest. The input 1 dB compression point at 2 GHz was -9 dBm while consumes 30 mW power from 1.5 V supply voltage. Moreover, excellent phase linearity (i.e., group delay variation) of ±125 ps was achieved across the whole band.

Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are the most popular acoustic features used in automatic speech recognition (ASR), mainly because the coefficients capture the most useful information of the speech and fit well with the assumptions used in hidden Markov models. As is well known, MFCCs already employ several principles which have known counterparts in the peripheral properties of human hearing: decoupling across frequency, mel-warping of the frequency axis, log-compression of energy, etc. It is natural to introduce more mechanisms in the auditory periphery to improve the noise robustness of MFCC. In this paper, a k-nearest neighbors based frequency masking filter is proposed to reduce the audibility of spectra valleys which are sensitive to noise. Besides, Moore and Glasberg's critical band equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB) expression is utilized to determine the filter bandwidth. Furthermore, a new bandpass infinite impulse response (IIR) filter is proposed to imitate the temporal masking phenomenon of the human auditory system. These three auditory perceptual mechanisms are combined with the standard MFCC algorithm in order to investigate their effects on ASR performance, and a revised MFCC extraction scheme is presented. Recognition performances with the standard MFCC, RASTA perceptual linear prediction (RASTA-PLP) and the proposed feature extraction scheme are evaluated on a medium-vocabulary isolated-word recognition task and a more complex large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) task. Experimental results show that consistent robustness against background noise is achieved on these two tasks, and the proposed method outperforms both the standard MFCC and RASTA-PLP.

The market growths of smart-phones and thin clients have been significantly increasing communication traffic in mobile networks. To handle the increased traffic, network operators should consider how to leverage distributed wireless resources such as distributed spots of wireless local access networks. In this paper, we consider the system where multiple moving users share distributed wireless access points on their traveling routes between their start and goal points and formulate as an optimization problem. Then, we come up with three algorithms as a solution for the problem. The key idea here is 'longcut route instruction', in which users are instructed to choose a traveling route where less congested access points are available; even if the moving distance increases, the throughput for users in the system would improve. In this paper, we define the gain function. Moreover, we analyze the basic characteristics of the system using as a simple model as possible.

The impact of non-ideal delay line (DL) along with group delay ripple (GDR) on the performance of ultra wide bandwidth (UWB) system has not yet been studied in previous literatures. In this paper, according to the currently designed DLs, we propose a statistical GDR model to achieve a practical UWB DL, and investigate the degradation in average bit error rate (BER) caused by the GDR for the transmitted-reference (TR) UWB communication systems. According to the analysis results, an improved autocorrelation receiver (AcR) is proposed. Through Monte Carlo simulations, the great performance improvement of the proposed AcR is verified by comparing it with the conventional TR AcR under non-ideal DL conditions. The proposed receiver framework is simple enough to enable a tractable analysis, and provides valuable insights for designing a practical TR UWB AcR that experiences GDR.

Miniaturized broadband antennas combining a fractal pattern and a self-complementary structure are demonstrated for UWB applications. Using four kinds of fractal patterns generated with an octagon initiator, similar to a self-complementary structure, we investigate the effect of the fractal pattern on broadband performance. The lower band-edge frequency of the broad bandwidth is decreased by the reduced constant input impedance, which is controlled by the vacant area size inside the fractal pattern. The reduced constant input impedance is shown to be produced by the extended current distribution flowing along the vacant areas. Given the results, miniaturized broadband antennas, impedance-matched to 50 Ω, are designed and fabricated. The measured return loss was better than 10 dB between 2.95 and 10.7 GHz with a size of 2712.5 mm. The lower band-edge frequency was reduced by 28% compared with the initiator.

We present MIMO-OFDM based broadband power line communication (BPLC) that uses antenna and fading diversity. We evaluate the proposed MIMO-OFDM over BPLC channels, with or without cross-talk between antenna paths. The proposed scheme employs maximum ratio combining (MRC) that effectively combines both multiple antenna diversity gain and multipath fading diversity gain over 3-phase (22 MIMO, outdoor) or 1-phase (SISO, indoor) power line channels. Simulation results prove the performance advantage of the proposed scheme, whether or not cross-talk exists, over existing schemes.

Conventional features for Automatic Speech Recognition and Sound Event Recognition such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) have been shown to perform poorly in noisy conditions. We introduce an auditory feature based on the gammatone filterbank, the Selective Gammatone Envelope Feature (SGEF), for Robust Sound Event Recognition where channel selection and the filterbank envelope is used to reduce the effect of noise for specific noise environments. In the experiments with Hidden Markov Model (HMM) recognizers, we shall show that our feature outperforms MFCCs significantly in four different noisy environments at various signal-to-noise ratios.

This paper develops the first prototype hardware for a TDD two-way multi-hop relay network with MIMO network coding. Since conventional wireless multi-hop relay networks have the drawback of low data rate, TDD two-way multi-hop relay networks have been studied as a solution to realize high data rate recently. In these networks, forward and backward streams are spatially multiplexed by using interference cancellation techniques such as MIMO beamforming or MIMO network coding. In this paper, a demonstration system for the TDD two-way multi-hop relay network with MIMO network coding (called 2-way relay network hereafter) is developed using the prototype hardware. In the demonstration system, each transmitter and receiver performs network coded broadcast and MIMO multiple access, respectively. By using the demonstration system, network throughput is measured in an indoor environment to prove the realization and effectiveness of the 2-way relay network. From the results of network throughput, it is found that the 2-way relay network can achieve high network throughput approaching theoretical upper bound even in low average end-to-end SNR area where network throughput of the direct link degrades severely. From these results, the realization and effectiveness of the 2-way relay network can be proved in the real indoor environment.

A new codebook mapping algorithm for artificial bandwidth extension (ABE) is introduced in this paper. We design a wideband line spectrum pair (LSP) codebook which is coupled with the same index as the LSP codebook of a narrowband speech codec. The received narrowband LSP codebook indices are used to directly induce wideband LSP codewords. Thus, the proposed scheme eliminates codebook search processing to estimate the wideband spectrum envelope. We apply the proposed scheme to bandwidth extension in adaptive multi-rate (AMR) compressed domain. Its performance is assessed via the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), informal listening tests, and weighted million operations per second (WMOPS) calculations.

This paper proposes optical node architectures for the single-layer optical cross-connect (OXC) and hierarchical OXC (HOXC) that utilize dedicated add/drop switches for originating/terminating traffic at a node. For both single-layer OXC and HOXC, three architectures with different restrictions on add/drop capabilities are presented. The performance of the proposed architectures is compared through numerical experiments. The architectures significantly reduce total switch scale and minimize necessary switch size while attaining colorless, directionless and contentionless capabilities.

This paper proposes an adaptive bandwidth control scheme for the private wireless networks. Carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), which is commonly used within the private networks, is not efficient in terms of spectral efficiency due to its strict collision avoidance process. In order to relax the collision avoidance rule, this paper employs dynamic spectrum control (DSC), in which a certain number of discrete spectra having the higher channel gain is selected in a selfish manner with each link allowing a partial band interference. Such interference may be suppressed by the equalizer at the receiver. Aiming at optimal selection of the bandwidth for the selfish DSC according to channel realizations, in the sense of throughput maximization, this paper proposes a channel capacity maximization-based BAR control scheme. Computer simulations validate that the proposed scheme achieves high throughput efficiency.

We propose an outband sensing-based IEEE 802.11h protocol without a full dynamic frequency selection (DFS) test. This scheme has two features. Firstly, every station performs a cooperative outband sensing, instead of inband sensing during a quiet period. And secondly, as soon as a current channel becomes bad, every station immediately hops to a good channel using the result of outband sensing. Simulation shows the proposed scheme increases network throughput against the legacy IEEE 802.11h.