Slotted wireless ad hoc networks are drawing more and more attention because of their advantage of QoS (Quality of Service) support for multimedia applications owing to their collision-free packet transmission. Time slot assignment is an unavoidable and important problem in such networks. The existing time slot assignment methods have in general a drawback of limited available bandwidth due to their local assignment optimization without the consideration of directions of the radio wave transmission of wireless links along the routes in such networks. A new time slot assignment is proposed in this paper in order to overcome this drawback. The proposed assignment is different from the existing methods in the following aspects: a) consideration of link directions during time slot assignment; b) largest bandwidth to be achieved; c) feasibility in resource limited ad hoc networks because of its fast assignment. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposal is confirmed by some simulation results.

Simple and accurate formulations are employed to represent discrete-time infinite impulse response (IIR) processes of first-order differentiator and integrator. These formulations allow them to be eligible for wide-band applications. Both first-order differentiator and integrator have an almost linear phase. The new differentiator has an error of less than 1% for the range 0-0.8π of normalized frequency and the new integrator has an error of less than 1.1% for the range 0-0.8π of normalized frequency.

In this paper, a design method of two-dimensional (2-D) orthogonal symmetric wavelets is proposed by using a lattice structure for multi-dimensional (M-D) linear-phase paraunitary filter banks (LPPUFB), which the authors have proposed as a previous work and then modified by Lu Gan et al. The derivation process for the constraints on the second-order vanishing moments is shown and some design examples obtained through optimization with the constraints are exemplified. In order to verify the significance of the constraints, some experimental results are shown for Lena and Barbara image.

In this paper, a novel design method of critically sampled contourlet transform (CSCT) is proposed. The original CT which consists of Laplacian pyramid and directional filter bank provides efficient frequency plane partition for image representation. However its overcompleteness is not suitable for some applications such as image coding, its critical sampling version has been studied recently. Although several types of the CSCT have been proposed, they have problems on their realization or unnatural frequency plane partition which is different from the original CT. In contrast to the way in conventional design methods based on a "top-down" approach, the proposed method is based on a "bottom-up" one. That is, the proposed CSCT decomposes the frequency plane into small directional subbands, and then synthesizes them up to a target frequency plane partition, while the conventional ones decompose into it directly. By this way, the proposed CSCT can design an efficient frequency division which is the same as the original CT for image representation can be realized. In this paper, its effectiveness is verified by non-linear approximation simulation.

The usable throughput of an IEEE 802.11 system for an application is much less than the raw bandwidth. Although 802.11b has a theoretical maximum of 11 Mbps, more than half of the bandwidth is consumed by overhead leaving at most 5 Mbps of usable bandwidth. Considering this characteristic, this paper proposes and analyzes a real-time distributed scheduling scheme based on the existing IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks, using USC/ISI's Power Aware Sensing Tracking and Analysis (PASTA) hardware platform. We compared the distributed real-time scheduling scheme with the real-time polling scheme to meet deadline, and compared a measured real bandwidth with a theoretical result. The theoretical and experimental results show that the distributed scheduling scheme can guarantee real-time traffic and enhances the performance up to 74% compared with polling scheme.

The superconducting band-pass filter has small insertion loss and excellent out-of-band rejection properties. It has been put to practical use in a number of applications. However, in order to expand its range of application, a tuning technique that can restore the filter characteristics is needed. We propose an automatic tuning system using a trimming library and checked the feasibility of the system by tuning a forward-coupled filter with three resonators. The results show that the trimming library method is an effective way of automatically improving the filter characteristics.

An improved dual-band design method is presented for the 180coupler. It uses the non-uniform impedance ring structure for the arbitrary power division and a π-shaped branch for the dual-band operation The increased design freedom offered by the proposed structure helps to extend the useful dual-band operation range.

We demonstrated all-optical demultiplexing of 160-Gb/s signal to 40- and 80-Gb/s by a Mach-Zehnder Interferometric all-optical switch, where the picosecond cross-phase modulation (XPM) induced by intersubband excitation in InGaAs/AlAsSb coupled double quantum wells is utilized. A bi-directional pump configuration, i.e., two control pulses are injected from both sides of a waveguide chip simultaneously, increases a nonlinear phase shift twice in comparison with injection of single pump beam with forward- and backward direction. The bi-directional pump configuration is the effective way to avoid damaging waveguide facets in the case where high optical power of control pulse is necessary to be injected for optical gating at repetition rate of 40/80 GHz. Bit error rate (BER) measurements on 40-Gb/s demultiplexed signal show that the power penalty is decreased slightly for the bi-directional pump case in the BER range less than 10-6. The power penalty is 1.3 dB at BER of 10 - 9 for the bi-directional pump case, while it increases by 0.3-0.6 dB for single pump cases. A power penalty is influenced mainly by signal attenuation at "off" state due to the insufficient nonlinear phase shift, upper limit of which is constrained by the current low XPM efficiency of 0.1 rad/pJ and the damage threshold power of 100 mW in a waveguide facet.

With the rapid progress of electronic and information technology, an expectation for the realization of body area network (BAN) by means of ultra wide band (UWB) techniques has risen. Although the signal from a single UWB device is very low, the energy absorption may increase significantly when many UWB devices are simultaneously adorned to a human body. An analysis method is therefore required from the point of view of biological safety evaluation. In this study, two approaches, one is in the time domain and the other is in the frequency domain, are proposed for the specific energy absorption (SA) and the specific absorption rate (SAR) calculation. It is shown that the two approaches have the same accuracy but the time-domain approach is more straightforward in the numerical analysis. By using the time-domain approach, SA and SAR calculation results are given for multiple UWB pulse exposure to an anatomical human body model under the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) UWB limit.

This paper is concerned with timing synchronization of high rates UWB signals operating in a dense multipath environment, where access must tackle inter-frame interference (IFI), inter-symbol interference (ISI) and even multi-user interference (MUI). A training-based joint timing and channel estimation scheme is proposed, which is resilient to IFI, ISI, MUI and pulse distortion. A low-complexity detection scheme similar to transmit-reference (TR) scheme comes out as a by-product. For saving the training symbols, we further develop an extended decision-directed (DD) scheme. A lower bound on the probability of correct detection is derived which agrees well with the simulated result for moderate to high SNR values. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a significant performance gain in terms of mean square error and bit error rate in comparison to the "timing with dirty templates" (TDT) algorithms.

The average age of population is predicted to be raised universally but the number of nursing staff is not increasing at the same rate. This leads us to the situation where, e.g., we have too many patients for one nurse. On the other hand, sparse population in some regions, such as Northern or Eastern Finland, causes a severe problem that doctors are far away from patient. In this paper, we summarize the possibilities and applications that utilize wireless technologies in healthcare sector and which can be useful in nursing activities. The use of new innovations is one way to solve the problems that are based on the expected lack of professional staff in the future. Despite of the very natural hospital link, the developed technical solutions have applications outside hospital. Remote care of aging people and other special groups need to be done daily and almost real-time. Keeping people home instead of hospital is one way to decrease the entire care costs. In addition to the obvious human context, we derive some other applications where we can benefit wireless nursing and remote sensing techniques.

Wireless communication devices in the field of medical implant, such as cardiac pacemakers and capsule endoscopes, have been studied and developed to improve healthcare systems. Especially it is very important to know the range and position of each device because it will contribute to an optimization of the transmission power. We adopt the time-based approach of position estimation using ultra wideband signals. However, the propagation velocity inside the human body differs in each tissue and each frequency. Furthermore, the human body is formed of various tissues with complex structures. For this reason, propagation velocity is different at a different point inside human body and the received signal so distorted through the channel inside human body. In this paper, we apply an adaptive template synthesis method in multipath channel for calculate the propagation time accurately based on the output of the correlator between the transmitter and the receiver. Furthermore, we propose a position estimation method using an estimation of the propagation velocity inside the human body. In addition, we show by computer simulation that the proposal method can perform accurate positioning with a size of medical implanted devices such as a medicine capsule.

In this paper, we propose a set of constraints for adaptive broad-band beamforming in the presence of angular errors. We first present spatial and frequency derivative constraints (SFDC) for the design of the quiescent beamformer response. With the wavelet-based blocking matrices, the proposed generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) preserves the desired signal, and it is less sensitive to the broad-band noise. To make this beamformer more robust to the directional mismatch, we add a pseudo-interference algorithm in the weight adaptive process. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the angular beamwidth is insensitive to the input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

Body Area Network (BAN) is considered as a promising technology in supporting medical and healthcare services by combining with various biological sensors. In this paper, we look at wearable BAN, which provides communication links among sensors on body surface. In order to design a BAN that manages biological information with high efficiency and high reliability, the propagation characteristics of BAN must be thoroughly investigated. As a preliminary effort, we measured the propagation characteristics of BAN at frequency bands of 400 MHz, 600 MHz, 900 MHz and 2400 MHz respectively. Channel models for wearable BAN based on the measurement were derived. Our results show that the channel model can be described by using a path loss model for all frequency bands investigated.

Body Area Networks (BAN) can provide a wide range of applications including medical support, healthcare monitoring, and consumer electronics with increased convenience or comfort. To harmonize with the strong demands from both medical and healthcare societies, and information and communications technology (ICT) industries, IEEE 802.15.6 task group (TG6) was set up to develop an IEEE wireless standard on BAN. This paper presents a general guidance to TG6. Some pre-works to set up TG6 are reviewed. The objectives, main topics, current status are described in details.

The medical body area network (MBAN) is an emerging technology to resolve the small area connection issues around human body, especially for the medical applications. This paper proposes a dynamic TDMA (DTDMA) protocol for MBAN with focus on the dependability and power efficiency. In DTDMA, the slots are allocated by the MBAN coordinator only to the devices which have buffered packets and released to other devices after the current allocation. Through the adaptive allocation of the slots in a DTDMA frame, the MBAN coordinator adjusts the duty cycle adaptively with the traffic load. Comparing with the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol, the DTDMA provides more dependability in terms of lower packet dropping rate and less energy consumption especially for an end device of a MBAN.

The purpose of this study is the real-time estimation of Doppler spectral moments for precipitation in the presence of ground clutter overlap. The proposed method is a frequency domain approach that uses a Gaussian model both to remove clutter spectrum and to estimate weather spectrum. The main advantage of this method is that it does not use processes like several fitting procedures and enables to estimate profiles of precipitation in a short processing time. Therefore this method is efficient for real-time radar observation with high range and time resolution. The performance of this method is evaluated based on simulation data and the observation data acquired by the Ku-band broad band radar (BBR) [1].

This paper presents the baseband receiver design and implementation for the ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless personal area networks (WPAN). In particular, the receiver algorithms, which include frame detection, timing/frequency synchronization, and channel estimation, are designed and implemented. Simulation results demonstrate that the receiver has a packet error rate of less than 8% when Eb/N0 = 4.7 dB, link margin = 10.7 dB, and data rate = 200 Mb/s. The proposed design has been designed using 0.13 µm single-poly eight-metal CMOS process. The overall power dissipation is 132 mW at a 132 MHz system clock, while the core area is 5.62 mm2.

This paper proposes a new algorithm for evaluating the number of chaining variable conditions (CVCs) in the selecting step of a disturbance vector (DV) for the analysis of SHA-1 collision search. The algorithm is constructed by combining four strategies, that can evaluate the number of CVCs more strictly compared with the previous approach. By using our method, we found some DVs that have 57 (or 59) essential CVCs for 1st (or 2nd) block in the case if we assume that we can modify messages up to step 25, which we have not confirmed the practicability of the assumption.

Software defined radio (SDR) technology has been widely applied for its powerful universality and flexibility in the past decade. To address the issue of bandpass sampling of multiband signals, a novel and efficient method of finding the minimum valid sampling frequency is proposed. Since there are frequency deviations due to the channel effect and hardware instability in actual systems, we also consider the guard-bands between downconverted signal spectra in determining the minimum sampling frequency. In addition, the case that the spectra within the sampled bandwidth are located in inverse placement can be avoided by our proposed method, which will reduce the complexity of the succeeding digital signal process significantly. Simulation results illustrate that the proper minimum sampling frequency can be determined rapidly and accurately.