SOBER-128 is a stream cipher designed by Rose and Hawkes in 2003. It can be also used for generating Message Authentication Codes (MACs) and an authenticated encryption. The developers claimed that it is difficult to forge MACs generated by both functions of SOBER-128, though, the security assumption in the proposal paper is not realistic in some instances. In this paper, we examine the security of these message authentication mechanisms of SOBER-128 under security channel model. As a result, we show that both a MAC generation and an authenticated encryption are vulnerable against differential cryptanalysis. The success probabilities of the MAC forgery attack are estimated at 2-6 and 2-27 respectively. In addition, we show that some secret bits are revealed if a key is used many times.

In medical education, many of computerized Problem-Based Learning (PBL) systems are used into their training curricula. But these systems do not truly reflect the situations which practitioners may actually encounter in a real medical environment, and hence their effectiveness as learning tools is somewhat limited. Therefore, the present study analyzes the computerized PBL teaching case, and considers how a clinical teaching case can best be presented to the student. Specifically, this paper attempts to develop a web-based PBL system which emulates the real clinical situation by introducing the concept of a "time sequence" within each teaching case. The proposed system has been installed in the medical center of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan for testing purposes. The participants in this study were 50 of 5th grade (equivalent to 1st grade students in a medical school of the American medical education system) students for the evaluation process. Some experiments are conducted to verify the advantages of designing teaching cases with the concept of the "time sequence."

Cyberworlds are being formed in cyberspaces as computational spaces. Now cyberspaces are rapidly expanding on the Web either intentionally or spontaneously, with or without design. Widespread and intensive local activities are melting each other on the web globally to create cyberworlds. The major key players of cyberworlds include e-finance that trades a GDP-equivalent a day and e-manufacturing that is transforming industrial production into Web shopping of product components and assembly factories. Lacking proper theory and design, cyberworlds have continued to grow chaotic and are now out of human understanding and control. This research first presents a generic theoretical framework and design based on algebraic topology, and also provides an axiomatic approach to theorize the potentials of cyberworlds.

This paper proposes a group signature scheme with efficient membership revocation. Though group signature schemes with efficient membership revocation based on a dynamic accumulator were proposed, the previous schemes force a member to change his secret key whenever he makes a signature. Furthermore, for the modification, the member has to obtain a public membership information of O(nN) bits, where n is the length of the RSA modulus and N is the total number of joining members and removed members. In our scheme, the signer needs no modification of his secret, and the public membership information has only K bits, where K is the maximal number of members. Then, for middle-scale groups with the size that is comparable to the RSA modulus size (e.g., up to about 1000 members for 1024 bit RSA modulus), the public membership information is a single small value only, while the signing/verification also remains efficient.

In this letter, we introduce the concept of k-error lattice structure to describe the stability of lattice structure for pseudorandom number sequences, give some of its properties, and make a study of the relationship between the k-error lattice structure and the k-error linear complexity. These properties and the relationship create an elementary framework to study the stability of the lattice structure of pseudorandom number sequences.

In this paper we give a simple algorithm to generate all partitions of {1,2,,n} into k non-empty subsets. The number of such partitions is known as the Stirling number of the second kind. The algorithm generates each partition in constant time without repetition. By choosing k = 1,2,,n we can also generate all partitions of {1,2,,n} into subsets. The number of such partitions is known as the Bell number.

In this paper, amplified double Rayleigh backscattering noise (DRB) in the optical fiber Raman amplifier is analyzed. Expressions are present for both forward pumping and backward pumping schemes, respectively. Calculation is performed to show the effective suppression of DRB noise by employing an optical isolator. The best isolator position is determined as 13 km away from the signal input end for forward pumping, and 9 km from the output end for backward pumping. The best position is found insensitive to the fiber length, pump power, and signal power. When the isolator is on the best position, the DRB noise can be reduced by almost 2 to 3 orders.

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) has been developed as an efficient switching technique to exploit the capacity provided by Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) transmission technology for the next generation optical Internet. One critical design issue in OBS is how to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) on optical networks. In order to provide the service differentiation, we propose in this paper a buffer allocation algorithm to schedule bursts at the edge OBS nodes, a bandwidth allocation algorithm and a Fiber Delay Line (FDL) allocation algorithm to schedule bursts at the core OBS nodes. We also introduce a new burst assembly technique in which the burst is generated either when the sum of the collected packet sizes reaches the maximum threshold or when the burst assembling time reaches the timeout limit. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithms achieve the controllable burst loss probability for different service classes. The bandwidth allocation algorithm performs very well at the core OBS nodes in terms of the low loss probability.

This manuscript proposes an FPGA by embedding a multidimensional switch topology onto a two-dimensional chip. We show, using Rent's Rule, that this procedure reduces the number of switches. Then we propose the actual procedure and demonstrate that this does not increase metal wire density critically.

We report tunable optical devices based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), whose filtering characteristics are controlled by strain distributions. These devices include a widely wavelength tunable filter, a tunable group-velocity dispersion (GVD) compensator, a tunable dispersion slope (DS) compensator, and a variable-bandwidth optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM), which will play important roles for next-generation reconfigurable optical networks.

To avoid over-engineered and expensive systems, it is important that the design takes account of variations in optical fiber characteristics due to the presence of many fiber pieces and splices in optical fiber networks. We present a design method for optical fiber networks that employ distributed Raman amplification (DRA), that considers variations in both optical losses at signal and pump wavelengths, Raman gain characteristics and splice losses. Our method can be applied to the design of both newly developed systems and installed systems. We show design examples based on our method and reveal the practicability of our method.

This letter describes the polarization mode dispersion (PMD) characteristic of optical fiber ribbons inserted tightly into helical slots. We investigate the mechanism of the birefringence induced in the optical fiber ribbons by lateral stress resulting from tension and bending in the helical slots. We discuss methods for the design of low PMD cables with reduced birefringence by considering coating materials and tensile strain control.

The effect of planar waveguide with conductor cladding (PWGCC) on evanescent coupling with a side-polished fiber is investigated using the three-dimensional finite difference beam propagation method (3D FD-BPM). The coupling and propagation of light were found to depend on the relationship between the refractive index values of each structure and the configuration of the side-polished fiber used in the PWGCC.

Holey Fiber (HF) technology has progressed rapidly in recent years and has resulted in the development of a wide range of optical fibers with unique and highly useful optical properties including endlessly single-mode guidance, and high optical nonlinearity. In this paper the state-of-the-art HF technology for all-optical signal processing devices is reviewed from a perspective of possible application for telecommunications.

A novel structure of guided-wave electro-optic modulators is proposed and their operation of the optical intensity modulation is successfully confirmed. The modulators use a newly developed modulation electrode consisting of coupled microstrip lines. A high voltage can be induced by the resonance of the odd propagation mode to realize efficient electro-optic modulation in spite of the microstrip-line configuration. The properties of the coupled microstrip lines were analytically evaluated by using the method of conformal transformations and the effectiveness as a modulation electrode was presented. The modulation electrodes of the half-wavelength coupled microstrip line resonator were designed at 10 GHz and 26 GHz, where the electrode lengths were 3 mm and 1.2 mm, respectively. The modulators using these electrodes with the Mach-Zehnder interferometer of LiTaO3 waveguides were fabricated. The measured modulation coefficient of the 26 GHz modulator normalized at 100 mW signal input was 0.13 rad.

We develop a method of dimensioning and managing the bandwidth of a link on which TCP flows from access links are aggregated. To do this, we extend the application of the processor-sharing queue model to TCP performance evaluation by using flow statistics. To handle various factors that affect actual TCP behavior, such as round-trip time, window-size, and restrictions other than access-link bandwidth, we extend the model by replacing the access-link bandwidth with the actual file-transfer speed of a flow when the aggregation link is not congested. We only use the number of active flows and the link utilization to estimate the file-transfer speed. Unlike previous studies, the extended model based on the actual transfer speed does not require any assumptions/predeterminations about file-size, packet-size, and round-trip times, etc. Using the extended model, we predict the TCP performance when the link utilization increases. We also show a method of dimensioning the bandwidth needed to maintain TCP performance. We show the effectiveness of our method through simulation analysis.

In this letter, we propose a low-complexity estimation method of cyclic-prefix (CP) length for a discrete multitone (DMT) very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) system. Using the sign bits of the received DMT VDSL signals, the proposed method provides a good estimate of CP length, which is suitable for various channel characteristics. This simple estimation method is consistent with the initialization procedure of T1E1.4 multi-carrier modulation (MCM)-based VDSL Standard. Finally, simulation results with VDSL test loops are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to present the novel technique to solve the recognition errors in invariant range image multi-pose face recognition. The scale, center and pose error problems were solved by using the geometric transform. Range image face data (RIFD) was obtained from a laser range finder and was used in the model to generate multi-poses. Each pose data size was reduced by linear reduction. The reduced RIFD was transformed to the gradient face model for facial feature image extraction and also for matching using the Membership Matching Score model. Using this method, the results from the experiment are acceptable although the size of gradient face image data is quite small (659 elements). Three-Layer Matching Search was the algorithm designed to reduce the access timing to the most accurate and similar pose position. The proposed algorithm was tested using facial range images from 130 people with normal facial expressions and without eyeglasses. The results achieved the mean success rate of 95.67 percent of 12 degrees up/down and left/right (UDLR) and 88.35 percent of 24 degrees UDLR.

This paper proposes a distributed adaptive routing algorithm that may be applied to inter-domain calls passing over any type of network topology, traffic management and switching techniques on the path, while carrying bidirectional traffic with multiple QoS requirements. The path is searched within a contour area restricted by the number of hops between source and destination while the end-to-end admission of calls is controlled at source node and each hop's admission at each node, reflecting the latest resources availability and network conditions for the given QoS requirements. Performance analysis in various conditions shows good applicability in real networks.

We consider space division multiplexing in a MIMO-OFDM system for high data rate transmission. Channel estimation is very important for suppressing interference and demultiplexing signals. In a wireless LAN system such as IEEE 802.11a, only a few training symbols are inserted in each subcarrier. First, we propose a channel estimation method for a MIMO-OFDM system with two training symbols per subcarrier. The basic idea is to estimate the time-domain channel responses between the transmit and receive antennas. The array response vectors for each subcarrier are calculated by applying a fast Fourier transform to them. We then can obtain the adaptive weights to cancel the interference. We show that employing training symbols having a lower condition number of the matrix used for the channel estimation improves the estimation accuracy. Furthermore, we show the bit error rate for several signal detection schemes using the above estimated channel. It is shown that an ordered successive detection based on an MMSE criterion has excellent performance, that is, it can achieve higher-speed transmissions with a lower transmit power.