This letter proposes a QoS control method for video streaming service over wireless networks. Based on statistical analysis, the time-varying MAC parameters highly related to channel condition are selected to predict available bitrate. Adaptive bitrate control of scalably-encoded video guarantees continuity in streaming service even if the channel condition changes abruptly.

An adaptive chirp beamforming method is proposed to solve the bias problem in the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of wideband chirp signals that have identical time-frequency parameters yet emanate from different directions. The proposed method, based on the steered minimum variance (STMV) method, exploits the time-frequency structure of a chirp signal to improve the DOA estimation performance by effectively suppressing the wideband chirp interferences causing the bias. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a novel MIMO system that introduces a heterogeneous stream (HTS) scheme and a blind signal detection method for mobile radio communications. The HTS scheme utilizes different modulation or coding methods for different MIMO streams, and the blind detection method requires no training sequences for signal separation, detection, and channel estimation. The HTS scheme can remove the ambiguity in identifying separated streams without unique words that are necessary in conventional MIMO blind detection. More specifically, two examples of HTS are considered: modulation type HTS (MHTS) and timing-offset type HTS (THTS). MHTS, which utilizes different modulation constellations with the same bandwidth for different streams, has been previously investigated. This paper proposes THTS which utilizes different transmission timing with the same modulation. THTS can make the blind detection more robust and effective with fractional sampling. The blind joint processing of detection and channel estimation performs adaptive blind MIMO-MLSE and is derived from an adaptive blind MLSE equalizer that employs the recursive channel estimation with the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse. Computer simulations show that the proposed system can achieve superior BER performance with Eb/N0 degradation of 1 dB in THTS and 2.5 dB in MHTS compared with the ideal maximum likelihood detection.

In this letter, a mobile relay station (MRS) for vehicles with beamforming antennas is considered to increase the reliability of transmission link, especially for the MRS at cell boundary. Joint methods for cell searching and DoA estimation are proposed to form a beam in the direction of target BS while nulling interferences from adjacent BSs, especially for IP-based cellular systems employing break-before-make handover or make-before-break handover. The proposed cell searching and DoA estimation methods are evaluated by computer simulation under the environment of IEEE 802.16e (WiBro).

For the construction of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) systems using their unique properties, a PCF coupler (PCFC) is one of the key components of the systems. The characteristics of the PCFC depend on the state of air holes in the tapered region of the PCFC because the state of air holes in the tapered region affects light propagation in the PCFC taper. In this paper, coupling characteristics of PCFCs were theoretically investigated. In PCFCs with air hole remaining tapers, we found that a smaller elongation ratio i.e. a stronger elongation is required to obtain optical coupling as an air hole pitch or a ratio of air hole diameter to pitch is larger. In PCFCs with air hole collapsed tapers, it was clarified that a dependence of extinction ratio on air hole collapsed elongation ratio is higher for smaller elongation ratio. It was also clarified that an air hole remaining PCFC has slow wavelength characteristics in extinction ratio compared to an air hole collapsed PCFC. Air hole remaining PCFCs and air hole collapsed PCFCs were fabricated using a CO2 laser irradiation technique. We could successfully control whether air holes in the PCFC taper were remaining or collapsed by adjusting the irradiated laser power in the elongation process of the PCFC fabrication. It was experimentally clarified that the air hole remaining PCFC has slow wavelength characteristics in extinction ratio compared to the air hole collapsed PCFC. The tendencies of the measured wavelength characteristics of PCFCs agree with those of numerical results.

Prior studies on limited feedback (LFB) beamforming in multiple-antenna orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) have resorted to Monte-Carlo simulations to evaluate the system performance. This letter proposes a novel analytical framework, based on which the averaged signal-to-noise ratio and the ergodic capacity performance of clustering-based LFB beamforming in multiple-antenna OFDM systems are studied. Simulations are also provided to verify the analysis.

A variant of the self-shrinking generator (SSG) proposed at ICISC 2006, which we call SSG-XOR, was claimed to have better cryptographic properties than SSG in a practical setting. It was also claimed that SSG-XOR will be more secure than SSG. But we show that SSG-XOR has no advantage over SSG from the viewpoint of practical cryptanalysis, especially the guess-and-determine attack.

In this letter, we analyze the performance of limited feedback beamforming in a distributed antenna system. We propose a novel codebook design scheme to maximize a lower bound of the averaged effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which is a function of the power of the signal and noise, the number of antennas, and the number of total feedback bits for characterizing the quantized channel vector. Simulations verify that the proposed scheme can provide effective capacity improvement.

This paper illustrates a feasible health informatics domain knowledge management process which helps gather useful technology information and reduce many knowledge misunderstandings among engineers who have participated in the IBM mainframe rightsizing project at National Taiwan University (NTU) Hospital. We design an asynchronously sharing mechanism to facilitate the knowledge transfer and our health informatics domain knowledge management process can be used to publish and retrieve documents dynamically. It effectively creates an acceptable discussion environment and even lessens the traditional meeting burden among development engineers. An overall description on the current software development status is presented. Then, the knowledge management implementation of health information systems is proposed.

Prior studies have shown that the performance of amplify-and-forward (AF) relay systems can be considerably improved by using multiple antennas and low complexity linear processing at the relay nodes. However, there is still a lack of performance analysis for the cases where the processing is based on limited feedback (LFB). Motivated by this, we derive the closed-form expression of the outage probability of AF relay systems with LFB beamforming in this letter. Simulation results are also provided to confirm the analytical studies.

In the design of Space Time Block Coding (STBC), for an arbitrary complex signal constellation with a size above 2 as well as a real signal matrix with a size above 8, it is difficult to acquire full code rate and full transmit diversity simultaneously. In this letter, an efficient selective receiver switching scheme is proposed for STBC with the full code rate and non-orthogonal design with the example of a 4-by-4 matrix. In the proposed scheme with the aid of beamforming, we divide the received signals into two groups according to the encoded matrix. By this way, we can eliminate the interference from the neighboring signals by more than half.

This paper proposes a new control scheme in which the base station (BS) controls terminal's transmit beamforming in time-division duplex (TDD)/multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. In the proposed scheme, the BS transmits pilot signals using appropriate downlink beams to instruct a terminal on target transmit beamforming. Using responses of the downlink pilot signals, the terminal can perform transmit beamforming close to the target one. Our theoretical investigation reveals that the BS can control multiple terminals' transmit beamforming simultaneously. Furthermore, an efficient signal processing at the terminal is investigated to obtain precise weight of transmit beamforming in noise environments. Numerical results show that the terminal can perform precise transmit beamforming close to the target one in noise environments. It is also shown that the amount of downlink control signalling in the proposed scheme is much less than that in codebook-based approach.

We propose a new algorithm for the blind source separation (BSS) approach in which independent component analysis (ICA) and frequency subband beamforming interpolation are combined. The slow convergence of the optimization of the separation filters is a problem in ICA. Our approach to resolving this problem is based on the relationship between ICA and null beamforming (NBF). The proposed method consists of the following three parts: (I) a frequency subband selector part for learning ICA, (II) a frequency domain ICA part with direction-of-arrivals (DOA) estimation of sound sources, and (III) an interpolation part in which null beamforming constructed with the estimated DOA is used. The results of the signal separation experiments under a reverberant condition reveal that the convergence speed is superior to that of the conventional ICA-based BSS methods.

Due to the demand of dual-band modern wireless communications, this paper presents a dual-band patch antenna for IEEE802.11 a and g wireless local area network (WLAN) system. The antenna has bidirectional patterns that can be switched by an RF switch to select the feeding probe positions. The 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz patches are stacked on a ground plane and are matched to the RF switch by open stubs. Analysis and design are illustrated and throughput improvement is demonstrated in an indoor environment.

In time-varying fading environments, the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems applying an eigenbeam-space division multiplexing (E-SDM) technique may be degraded due to a channel change during the time interval between the transmit weight matrix determination and the actual data transmission. To compensate for the channel change, we have proposed some channel prediction methods. Simulation results based on computer-generated channel data showed that better performance can be obtained when using the prediction methods in Rayleigh fading environments assuming the Jakes model with rich scatterers. However, actual MIMO systems may be used in line-of-sight (LOS) environments, and even in a non-LOS case, scatterers may not be uniformly distributed around a receiver and/or a transmitter. In addition, mutual coupling between antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver cannot be ignored as it affects the system performance in actual implementation. We conducted MIMO channel measurement campaigns at a 5.2 GHz frequency band to evaluate the channel prediction techniques. In this paper, we present the experiment and simulation results using the measured channel data. The results show that robust bit-error rate performance is obtained when using the channel prediction methods and that the methods can be used in both Rayleigh and Rician fading environments, and do not need to know the maximum Doppler frequency.

Dirty paper coding (DPC) is a strategy to achieve the region capacity of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) downlink channels and a DPC scheduler is throughput optimal if users are selected according to their queue states and current rates. However, DPC is difficult to implement in practical systems. One solution, zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) strategy has been proposed to achieve the same asymptotic sum rate capacity as that of DPC with an exhaustive search over the entire user set. Some suboptimal user group selection schedulers with reduced complexity based on ZFBF strategy (ZFBF-SUS) and proportional fair (PF) scheduling algorithm (PF-ZFBF) have also been proposed to enhance the throughput and fairness among the users, respectively. However, they are not throughput optimal, fairness and throughput decrease if each user queue length is different due to different users channel quality. Therefore, we propose two different scheduling algorithms: a throughput optimal scheduling algorithm (ZFBF-TO) and a reduced complexity scheduling algorithm (ZFBF-RC). Both are based on ZFBF strategy and, at every time slot, the scheduling algorithms have to select some users based on user channel quality, user queue length and orthogonality among users. Moreover, the proposed algorithms have to produce the rate allocation and power allocation for the selected users based on a modified water filling method. We analyze the schedulers complexity and numerical results show that ZFBF-RC provides throughput and fairness improvements compared to the ZFBF-SUS and PF-ZFBF scheduling algorithms.

Crosstalk is a major issue in modern ADSL and VDSL systems. Static spectrum management (SSM), the traditional way to guarantee spectrum compatibility, employs spectral masks which can be overly restrictive and result in poor performance. In this paper, fixed margin iterative water-filling algorithm is investigated in downstream VDSL and ADSL2+ scenario when they are in the same binder. The algorithm can minimize the transmission power and at the same time the overall high-quality service is guaranteed for all the users of the same binder. Simulation results show that ADSL2+ can realize performance gains of up to 80% compared with SSM techniques or ADSL.

We propose an algorithm for finding heavy hitters in terms of cardinality (the number of distinct items in a set) in massive traffic data using a small amount of memory. Examples of such cardinality heavy-hitters are hosts that send large numbers of flows, or hosts that communicate with large numbers of other hosts. Finding these hosts is crucial to the provision of good communication quality because they significantly affect the communications of other hosts via either malicious activities such as worm scans, spam distribution, or botnet control or normal activities such as being a member of a flash crowd or performing peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. To precisely determine the cardinality of a host we need tables of previously seen items for each host (e.g., flow tables for every host) and this may infeasible for a high-speed environment with a massive amount of traffic. In this paper, we use a cardinality estimation algorithm that does not require these tables but needs only a little information called the cardinality summary. This is made possible by relaxing the goal from exact counting to estimation of cardinality. In addition, we propose an algorithm that does not need to maintain the cardinality summary for each host, but only for partitioned addresses of a host. As a result, the required number of tables can be significantly decreased. We evaluated our algorithm using actual backbone traffic data to find the heavy-hitters in the number of flows and estimate the number of these flows. We found that while the accuracy degraded when estimating for hosts with few flows, the algorithm could accurately find the top-100 hosts in terms of the number of flows using a limited-sized memory. In addition, we found that the number of tables required to achieve a pre-defined accuracy increased logarithmically with respect to the total number of hosts, which indicates that our method is applicable for large traffic data for a very large number of hosts. We also introduce an application of our algorithm to anomaly detection. With actual traffic data, our method could successfully detect a sudden network scan.

Effects of Fe/Si ratio and growth temperature were investigated in order to realize high quality Fe3Si/Ge structures. It was found that very small χmin values (2-3%) were achieved in a wide temperature range of 60-200 under the stoichiometric condition. From TEM observation, it was rvealed that the Fe3Si/Ge structures with atomically flat interfaces were realized. In addition, thermal stability of the Fe3Si/Ge structures was guaranteed up to 400. These results suggested that growth at a low temperature (<200) under the stoichiometric condition was essential to obtain high quality Fe3Si/Ge structures with sharp interfaces.

Impulse ultra-wideband (UWB) is an attractive technology for large ad hoc sensor networks due to its precise ranging capacity, multi-path fading robustness and low radiation power. The transient and carrier-less nature of low radiation pulse and harsh multipath channel condition makes it cumbersome to implement carrier sensing. We proposed clear channel assessment (CCA) based on preamble-assisted modulation (PAM) for UWB sensor networks. Preamble symbols are periodically inserted into the frame payload in the time domain to serve as regular feature for reliable CCA. We simulated the CCA performance in the multipath UWB channel model developed by IEEE 802.15.4a. PAM and CCA configurations were optimized for the distributed carrier sense multiple access protocol. PAM was accepted by 802.15.4a group as an optional feature. Furthermore, the multiplexed preamble symbols can be exploited for channel estimation to improve communication and ranging.