In the theory of periodic gratings, there is no method to make up a numerical solution that satisfies the reciprocity so far. On the basis of the shadow theory, however, this paper proposes a new method to obtain a numerical solution that satisfies the reciprocity. The shadow thoery states that, by the reciprocity, the $m$th order scattering factor is an even function with respect to a symmetrical axis depending on the order $m$ of diffraction. However, a scattering factor obtained numerically becomes an even function only approximately, but not accurately. It can be decomposed to even and odd components, where an odd component represents an error with respect to the reciprocity and can be removed by the average filter. Using even components, a numerical solution that satisfies the reciprocity is obtained. Numerical examples are given for the diffraction of a transverse magnetic (TM) plane wave by a very rough periodic surface with perfect conductivity. It is then found that, by use of the average filter, the energy error is much reduced in some case.

A coherent combining-based initial ranging scheme is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output and orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems. The proposed algorithm utilizes the correlation properties of the ranging codes to resolve the multipath components, coherently combines the initial ranging signal of resolved path on each receiving antenna to maximize the output signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio, and then collects the power of the multipath signals to detect the states of the ranging codes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has much better performance than the available noncoherent combining method, and can accommodate more active ranging users simultaneously in each cell.

This paper proposes low-power voltage-mode/current-mode hybrid circuits to realize an arbitrary two-variable logic function and a full-adder function. The voltage and current mode can be selected for low-power operations at low and high frequency, respectively, according to speed requirement. An nMOS pass transistor network is shared to realize voltage switching and current steering for the voltage- and current-mode operations, respectively, which leads to high utilization of the hardware resources. As a result, when the operating frequency is more than 1.15,GHz, the current mode of the hybrid logic circuit is more power-efficient than the voltage mode. Otherwise, the voltage mode is more power-efficient. The power consumption of the hybrid two-variable logic circuit is lower than that of the conventional two-input look-up table (LUT) using CMOS transmission gates, when the operating frequency is more than 800,MHz. The delay and area of the hybrid two-variable logic circuit are increased by only 7% and 13%, respectively

This paper focuses on the S-parameter method that is a basic method for measuring the input impedance of balanced-fed antennas. The basic concept of the method is summarized using the two-port network, and it is shown that the method can be enhanced to the unbalanced antennas using a formulation based on incident and reflected waves. The compensation method that eliminates the influence of a measurement jig and the application of the S-parameter method for the measurement of a radiation pattern with reduced unbalanced currents are explained. Further, application of the method for measuring the reflection and coupling coefficients of multiple antennas is introduced. The measured results of the input impedance of a dipole antenna, radiation patterns of a helical antenna on a small housing, and S-parameters of multiple antennas on a small housing are examined, and the measured results obtained with the S-parameter method are verified.

Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) improves the system channel capacity by employing the transmission between a base station and multiple user terminals (UTs). Block Diagonalization (BD) has been proposed in order to realize MU-MIMO broadcast transmission. The BD algorithm cancels inter-user interference by creating the weights so that the channel matrixes for the other users are set to be zero matrixes. However, when the number of transmit antennas is equals to the total number of received antennas, the transmission rate by the BD algorithm is decreased. This paper proposes a new antenna selection method at the UTs to reduce the number of nulls for the other users except an intended user by the BD algorithm. It is verified via bit error rate (BER) evaluation that the proposed method is effective compared to the conventional BD algorithm, especially, when the number of users is increased with a low bit rate. Moreover, this paper evaluates the transmission rate based on IEEE802.11ac standard when considering BD algorithm with ideal user scheduling. Although the number of equivalent receive antenna is only one by the proposed method when the number of antennas at the the UT is two, it is shown that the transmission rate by the proposed method is higher than that by the conventional BD algorithm when the SNR is low even in the condition on user scheduling.

Anomaly detection has several practical applications in different areas, including intrusion detection, image processing, and behavior analysis among others. Several approaches have been developed for this task such as detection by classification, nearest neighbor approach, and clustering. This paper proposes alternative clustering algorithms for the task of anomaly detection. By employing a weighted kernel extension of the least squares fitting of linear manifolds, we develop fuzzy clustering algorithms for kernel manifolds. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms achieve promising performances compared to hard clustering techniques.

This paper proposes a noise reduction method for impact noise with damped oscillation caused by clinking a glass, hitting a bottle, and so on. The proposed method is based on the zero phase (ZP) signal defined as the IDFT of the spectral amplitude. When the target noise can be modeled as the sum of the impact part and the damped oscillation part, the proposed method can reduce them individually. First, the proposed method estimates the damped oscillation spectra and subtracts them from the observed spectra. Then, the impact part is reduced by replacing several samples of the ZP observed signal. Simulation results show that the proposed method improved 10dB of SNR of real impact noise.

In this paper, we propose a modified-error adaptive feedback active noise control (ANC) system using a linear prediction filter. The proposed ANC system is advantageous in terms of the rate of convergence, while maintaining stability, because it can reduce narrowband noise while suppressing disturbance, including wideband components. The estimation accuracy of the noise control filter in the conventional system is degraded because the disturbance corrupts the input signal to the noise control filter. A solution of this problem is to utilize a linear prediction filter. The linear prediction filter is utilized for the modified-error feedback ANC system to suppress the wideband disturbance because the linear prediction filter can separate narrowband and wideband noise. Suppressing wideband noise is important for the head-mounted ANC system we have already proposed for reducing the noise from a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device because the error microphones are located near the user's ears and the user's voice consequently corrupts the input signal to the noise control filter. Some simulation and experimental results obtained using a digital signal processor (DSP) demonstrate that the proposed feedback ANC system is superior to a conventional feedback ANC system in terms of the estimation accuracy and the rate of convergence of the noise control filter.

As new systems and applications are introduced for next-generation wireless systems, the propagation channels in which they operate need to be characterized. This paper discusses propagation channels for four types of next-generation systems: (i) distributed Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Cooperative MultiPoint (CoMP) systems, which require the characterization of correlation between channels from a mobile station to different base stations or access points; (ii) device-to-device communications, where propagation channels are characterized by strong mobility at both link ends (e.g., in vehicle-to-vehicle communications), and/or significant impact of moving shadowing objects; (iii) full-dimensional MIMO, where antenna arrays extend in both the horizontal and vertical dimension, so that azimuthal and elevation dispersion characteristics of the channel become relevant, and (iv) millimeter wave Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and cellular communication systems, where the high carrier frequency leads to a change (compared to microwave communications) concerning which propagation processes are dominant. For each of these areas, we give an overview of measurements and models for key channel properties. A discussion of open issues and possible future research avenues is also provided.

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) schemes, the concept introduced by Goldreich and Ostrovsky, are very useful technique for protecting users' privacy when storing data in remote untrusted servers and running software on untrusted systems. However they are usually considered impractical due to their huge overhead. In order to reduce overhead, many improvements have been presented. Thanks to these improvements, ORAM schemes can be considered practical on cloud environment where users can expect huge storage and high computational power. Especially for private information retrieval (PIR), some literatures demonstrated they are usable. Also dedicated PIRs have been proposed and shown that they are usable in practice. Yet, they are still impractical for protecting software running on untrusted systems. We first survey recent researches on ORAM and PIR. Then, we present a practical software-based memory protection scheme applicable to several environments. The main feature of our scheme is that it records the history of accesses and uses the history to hide the access pattern. We also address implementing issues of ORAM and propose practical solutions for these issues.

The recent development of communication devices and wireless network technologies continues to advance the new era of the Internet and telecommunications. The various “things”, which include not only communication devices but also every other physical object on the planet, are also going to be connected to the Internet, and controlled through wireless networks. This concept, which is referred to as the “Internet of Things (IoT)”, has attracted much attention from many researchers in recent years. The concept of IoT can be associated with multiple research areas such as body area networks, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications networks, home area networks, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks, satellite networks, and so forth. Also, there are various kinds of applications created by using IoT technologies. Thus, the concept of the IoT is expected to be integrated into our society and support our daily life in the near future. In this paper, we introduce different classifications of IoT with examples of utilizing IoT technologies. In addition, as an example of a practical system using IoT, a tsunami detection system (which is composed of a satellite, sensor terminals, and an active monitoring system for real-time simultaneous utilization of the devices) is introduced. Furthermore, the requirements of the next generation systems with the IoT are delineated in the paper.

This paper proposes a new small multiband printed antenna for wireless telecommunications modules that can realize Machine-to-Machine applications. We reconfigure our previous antenna to cover the 700MHz, 800MHz, and 900MHz bands, and add two new elements (second strips) to cover the 2GHz band. The new antenna achieves operation in quad-bands: 700MHz, 800MHz, 900MHz, and 2GHz. Frequency characteristics are analyzed using electromagnetic-simulation software based on the method of moments, and the validity of the numerical results is shown based on measured Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) characteristics and the radiation patterns of a prototype antenna. The proposed antenna is compact with a VSWR bandwidth (≤2) of 27.5% in bands including 700MHz, 800MHz, and 900MHz, and a VSWR bandwidth (≤2) of 10.6% in the band including 2GHz. We clarify that the operating mechanism in the 2GHz band is equivalent to that of a one wavelength folded offset fed dipole antenna comprising a monopole element and second strips, and that the operating frequency in the 2GHz band can be determined by the path length from the tip of the monopole element to the tip of the second strip via a feeding point.

The emerging high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard attempts to improve the coding efficiency by a factor of two over H.264/AVC through the use of new compression tools such as various block sizes with multiple directions. Although multiple-directional predictions are among the features contributing to the improved compression efficiency, its high computational complexity keeps it from being used widely. This paper presents an algorithm to skip backward and bi-directional predictions when merge or forward prediction modes are likely to be determined as the best mode. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of the fact that there is a cost relationship among multi-directional predictions and that the results of backward and bi-directional predictions are therefore predictable before the actual operations. After merge and forward predictions, if the expected results of backward and bi-directional predictions are worse than the results up to that point, then additional backward and bi-directional predictions to search for more accurate motion vectors are not performed. A simulation shows that the encoding time is reduced by about 15.18% with a marginal degradation in compression efficiency.

In this paper, we propose a scalable connection-based time division multiple access architecture for wireless NoC. In this architecture, only one-hop transmission is needed when a packet is transmitted from one wired subnet to another wired subnet, which improves the communication performance and cuts down the energy consumption. Furthermore, by carefully designing the central arbiter, the bandwidth of the wireless channel can be fully used. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional WCube wireless NoC architecture, the proposed architecture can greatly improve the network throughput, and cut down the transmission latency and energy consumption with a reasonable area overhead.

We proposed a method for estimating sound source positions in 3D space by integrating sound directions estimated by multiple microphone arrays and taking advantage of reflection information. Two types of sources with different directivity properties (human speech and loudspeaker speech) were evaluated for different positions and orientations. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of using reflection information, depending on the position and orientation of the sound sources relative to the array, walls, and the source type. The use of reflection information increased the source position detection rates by 10% on average and up to 60% for the best case.

Binaural reproduction is one of the promising approaches to present a highly realistic virtual auditory space to a listener. Generally, binaural signals are reproduced using a set of headphones that leads to a simple implementation of such a system. In contrast, binaural signals can be presented to a listener using a technique called “transaural reproduction” which employs a few loudspeakers with crosstalk cancellation for compensating acoustic transmissions from the loudspeakers to both ears of the listener. The major advantage of transaural reproduction is that a listener is able to experience binaural reproduction without wearing any device. This leads to a more natural listening environment. However, in transaural reproduction, the listener is required to be still within a very narrow sweet spot because the crosstalk canceller is very sensitive to the listener's head position and orientation. To solve this problem, dynamic transaural systems have been developed by utilizing contact type head tracking. This paper introduces the development of a dynamic transaural system with non-contact head tracking which releases the listener from any attachment, thereby preserving the advantage of transaural reproduction. Experimental results revealed that sound images presented in the horizontal and median planes were localized more accurately when the system tracked the listener's head rotation than when the listeners did not rotate their heads or when the system did not track the listener's head rotation. These results demonstrate that the system works effectively and correctly with the listener's head rotation.

This letter describe target classification from the synthesized active sonar returns from targets. A fractional Fourier transform is applied to the sonar returns to extract shape variation in the fractional Fourier domain depending on the highlight points and aspects of the target. With the proposed features, four different targets are classified using two neural network classifiers.

Activity recognition has recently been playing an important role in several research domains, especially within the healthcare system. It is important for physicians to know what their patients do in daily life. Nevertheless, existing research work has failed to adequately identify human activity because of the variety of human lifestyles. To address this shortcoming, we propose the high performance activity recognition framework by introducing a new user context and activity location in the activity log (AL2). In this paper, the user's context is comprised by context-aware infrastructure and human posture. We propose a context sensor network to collect information from the surrounding home environment. We also propose a range-based algorithm to classify human posture for combination with the traditional user's context. For recognition process, ontology-based activity recognition (OBAR) is developed. The ontology concept is the main approach that uses to define the semantic information and model human activity in OBAR. We also introduce a new activity log ontology, called AL2 for investigating activities that occur at the user's location at that time. Through experimental studies, the results reveal that the proposed context-aware activity recognition engine architecture can achieve an average accuracy of 96.60%.

A new real-time sound field transmission system is presented. To construct this system, a large listening area needs to be reproduced at not less than a constant height. Additionally, the driving signals of the loudspeakers should be obtained only from received signals of microphones. Wave field reconstruction (WFR) filtering for linear arrays of microphones and loudspeakers is considered to be suitable for this kind of system. An experimental system was developed to show the feasibility of real-time sound field transmission using the WFR filter. Experiments to measure the reproduced sound field and a subjective listening test of sound localization were conducted to evaluate the proposed system. Although the reproduced sound field included several artifacts such as spatial aliasing and faster amplitude decay, the experimental results indicated that the proposed system was able to provide sound localization accuracy for virtual sound sources comparable to that for real sound sources in a large listening area.

There has been increasing demand to research the measuring method to characterize the batch consistency of contact rivets. An automated test equipment has been described that makes it possible to measure the electrical contact resistance with high efficiency. The relationship between contact force and contact resistance during the loading and unloading process was measured explicitly using AgPd alloy, stainless steel and sapphire substrate material with Au coatings as sphere indenters separately. To explain the phenomena of contact resistance decreasing more slowly than the traditional theoretical results during loading, the indenter with coating and rivet are modeled by using the commercial FEM software COMSOL Multiphysics. Besides the constriction resistance, the transition region Au coating resistance and the bulk resistance of the substrate are deduced from the simulated current lines profiles and iso-potentials. The difference of electrical conductivity between indenter material and gold coating is the reason for the occurrence of the transition region.