MIMO systems using a space division multiplexing (SDM) technique in which each transmit antenna sends an independent signal substream have been studied as one of the successful applications to increase data rates in wireless communications. The throughput of a MIMO channel can be maximized by using an eigenbeam-SDM (E-SDM) technique, and this paper investigates the practical performance of 22 and 44 MIMO E-SDM based on indoor measurements. The channel capacity and bit error rate obtained in various uniform linear array configurations are evaluated and are compared with the corresponding values for conventional SDM. Analysis results show that the bit error rate performance of E-SDM is better than that of SDM and that E-SDM gives better performance in line-of-sight (LOS) conditions than in non-LOS ones. They also show that the performance of E-SDM in LOS conditions depends very much on the array configuration.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been adopted in the physical layer of WLAN systems such as IEEE802.11a. In this letter, an efficient preamble structure is proposed to improve the frequency synchronization performance of OFDM-based WLAN systems. The novel preamble effectively multiplexes two different symbols, and the frequency-offset estimation can efficiently utilize the preamble for better estimation performance. Simulation results indicate that using the proposed preamble structure, the frequency synchronization performance can significantly be improved in OFDM-based WLAN systems.

A transport layer mobility management scheme for handling seamless handoffs between appropriate networks is presented. The future mobile environment will be characterized by multimodal connectivity with dynamic switching. Many technologies have been proposed to support host mobility across diverse wireless networks, and operate in various layers of the network architecture. Our major focus is on the transport protocol that recovers packets lost during handoffs and controls transmission speed to achieve efficient communication. Majority of the existing technologies can maintain the connection by updating the information of a single connection around a handoff. Moreover, none of the studies extensively examine the handoff latencies and focus how an appropriate network is selected, during the handoff. In this paper, we first extensively investigate the various handoff latencies and discuss the limited performance of existing technologies based on the single connection. We then propose a new scheme resolving the problems by the transport protocol enabling the adaptive selection of an appropriate interface based on communication condition among all available interfaces. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme promptly and reliably selects the appropriate interface, and achieves excellent goodput performance by comparing with the existing technologies.

The character projection (CP) lithography is utilized for maskless lithography and is a potential for the future photomask fabrication. The drawback of the CP lithography is its low throughput and leads to a price rise of IC devices. This paper discusses a technology mapping technique for enhancing the throughput of the CP lithography. The number of electron beam (EB) shots to project an entire chip directly determines the fabrication time for the chip as well as the throughput of CP equipment. Our technology mapping technique maps EB shot count-effective cells to a circuit in order to increase the throughput of CP equipment. Our technique treats the number of EB shots as an objective to minimize. Comparing with a conventional technology mapping, our technology mapping technique has achieved 26.6% reduction of the number of EB shots for the front-end-of-the-line (FEOL) process without any performance degradation of ICs. Moreover, our technology mapping technique has achieved a 54.6% less number of EB shots under no performance constraints. It is easy for both IC designers and equipment developers to adopt our technique because our technique is a software approach with no additional modification on CP equipment.

In recent years, the inherent effectiveness of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks has been advocated to address scalability issues in large scale Internet-based on-Demand streaming services. Most of existing works adopt Cache-and-Relay (CR) scheme to exploit a cooperative paradigm among peers. In this paper, we mainly present our practical evaluation study of the scalability of the CR scheme by taking into account of more than 20,000,000 collected real traces. Based on trace-driven simulations, we conclude that the CR scheme is not as effective as previously reported in terms of saving server bandwidth.

This paper contributes to a new generalized cyclotomic sequences of order two with respect to p1e1p2e2… ptet. The emphasis is on the linear complexity and autocorrelation of new prime-square sequences and two-prime sequences, two special cases of these generalized cyclotomic sequences. Our method is based on their characteristic polynomials. Results show that these sequences possess good linear complexity. Under certain conditions, the autocorrelation functions of new prime-square sequences and two-prime sequences may be three-valued.

In this letter, the effects of transmit beamforming on downlink performance in DS-CDMA communication systems are examined. We present a simple-to-use expression for the conditional instantaneous SINR after Rake combining. Assuming BPSK modulation, the performance of average bit error rate is evaluated. We compare the average BER performance obtained by different beamforming methods under frequency selective multipath fading channels.

In this letter, we propose a limited feedback precoding scheme based upon grassmannian beamforming and user selection for downlink multiuser MIMO systems. Conventional random beamforming scheme only enjoys significant performance gains with a large number of users, which limits its practical application. With proper codebook size the proposed scheme outperforms conventional random beamforming scheme when the number of users is small or moderate.

This paper introduces an adaptive GOP structure (AGS), which adaptively defines the GOP structure according to the time-varying temporal properties of video sequences, and thus improves the coding efficiency of the MPEG & ITU-T's Joint Scalable Video Coding (JSVC) scheme, the method proposed in this paper, which adaptively modifies the size of GOP based on the image characteristics of video sequence, improves the coding efficiency up to 0.77 dB compared to the JSVC JSVM (Joint Scalable Video Model).

This paper proposes a new rectangular horn with two orthogonal multiple-step taper sections for obtaining a dual-polarized elliptical-beam. One of the sections has a stepwise sectoral taper configuration on both sidewalls that starts with a square waveguide feed and then the other is a taper one on both top and bottom walls toward the rectangular aperture. The proposed taper configuration is useful enough to control higher-order modes required for an elliptical beam and is so simple to apply optimization design based on mode-matching approach. As a design example, we present a rectangular horn with -10 dB beamwidth of 33 90at 9.5-10.5 GHz. The effectiveness of the proposed horn is verified numerically and experimentally.

In this letter,we design a special preamble composed of two OFDM training blocks with different numbers of identical parts. Based on the designed preamble, we propose a method to estimate frequency offset utilizing initial estimates from the two OFDM training symbols. By elaborately selecting the numbers of identical parts for the two training blocks, the proposed estimator provides a much larger estimate range than conventional estimators using identical parts. Computer simulations show that the proposed estimator exhibits superior estimate performance, while maintaining low computational complexity.

This paper presents a low cost and portable DOA (Direction Of Arrival) estimation system for surveillance using a modifed beamspace MUSIC (MUltiple Signal Classification) by a quasi-orthogonal multi-beam. This is instead of DFT processing and hardware system consisting of chip-sized phase shifters, a single ADC (Analogue to Digital Converter) and a single TR (TRanceiver) module for an antenna array. In the beamspace MUSIC, generated beampatterns have orthogonal properties. This proposed system cannot make such a beampattern due to the variable range limitation of phase shifter, then we use the quasi-orthogonal beam obtained by the calculation of correlation coefficient for beampattern. We demonstrate the proposed system using 4-element microstrip array antenna and chip-sized phase shifters. The DOA experiment in anechoic chamber confirms the proposed system performance.

Using an electro-absorption duplexer (EAD) we presented a transceiver (TRx) module for dual function of both electrical-to-optical (E/O) and optical-to-electrical (E/O) conversion at 60 GHz band. The EAD chip was fabricated by monolithically integrating both a waveguide photodiode (PD) and an electro-absorption modulator (EAM) in association with traveling wave electrodes. We also investigated the issues of RF packaging in which the optoelectronic and electronic amplifier devices were co-packaged in a single housing. The RF impedance matching was accomplished in assistance with a microstrip bandpass filter.

Optically controlled beam forming techniques are effective for phased-array antenna control. We have developed the Fourier transform optical beamformer (FT-OBF). The antenna radiation pattern inputted into an amplitude spatial light modulator (A-SLM) is optically Fourier transformed to a specific phase-front light beam equivalent to an antenna excitation in the FT-OBF. Optical signal processing, used the Fourier transform optics, is effective to large-scale, two-dimensional, and high-speed signal processing. To implement a flexible and finer antenna beam pattern control, we use an A-SLM as input image formation of the FT optics. And, to realize a small-size FT-OBF, we use symmetric triplet lenses with convex, concave and convex lens. The total optical system becomes below 1/5 length compared with the length using single lens. Finally, we evaluated the developed FT-OBF with the generated amplitude and phase distributions, which excitation signal of an array antenna. We measured an antenna radiation beam pattern, beam steering and beam width control, in the C-band. Measurement results agreed with theoretical calculated results. These results show the feasibility of the spatial light modulator based FT-OBF.

Lightwave switching is discussed with a cascaded connection of optical couplers with light intensity control elements. By employing wavelength-selective amplifiers such as a waveguide-type Raman amplifier, all-optical wavelength-selective switching can be realized. We discuss analytically using coupled-mode theory that the lightwave switching is feasible by controlling the intensity of propagating lightwave. The switching operation is verified numerically using finite-difference beam-propagation method. As a result, the expected operation is realized and some characteristics involved with dependencies of wavelength and phase are also investigated. A preliminary experiment using attenuators, beam splitters and mirrors is also described to verify the switching operation with only light-intensity control in interferometers.

A waveguide-based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor with an adsorbed layer is analyzed using the beam-propagation method. For two-dimensional (2-D) models, numerical results show that the change in thickness of the adsorbed layer placed on the metal leads to a significant shift of the maximum absorption wavelength. Through eigenmode analysis, the maximum absorption wavelength is found to be consistent with the cutoff wavelength of the second-order surface plasmon mode. The designed 2-D sensor shows an absorption wavelength shift from 0.595 to 0.603 µm, when the analyte refractive index is increased from 1.330 to 1.334. After a basic investigation using the 2-D models, we next study 3-D models. When the metal with the absorbed layer is wide enough to cover the core region, the 3-D results are similar to the 2-D results. However, as the metal width is reduced, the absorption wavelength shifts toward a shorter wavelength and the sensitivity to the refractive index change degrades gradually. The degradation of the sensitivity is considerable when the metal width is narrower than the core width. As a result, the metal width of the practical SPR sensor should be slightly wider than the core width so as to maintain the sensitivity corresponding to that obtained for the 2-D model.

Our investigation of diamond-like carbon (DLC) nano-springs with a 130 nm spring-section diameter, which were fabricated by focused-ion-beam chemical vapor deposition (FIB-CVD), showed for the first time that nanosprings can be stretched. We observed large displacements of the FIB-CVD nanosprings using in situ optical microscopy; in other words, the nanosprings showed behavior similar to that of macroscale springs. In addition, we investigated the dependence of the spring constant of DLC nanosprings on spring diameter. The spring constants, measured using commercially available cantilevers, ranged from 0.47 to 0.07 N/m. The diameter dependence of spring constant can be accurately expressed by the conventional formula for a coil spring. The estimated shear modulus of the DLC nano-springs was about 70 GPa. This value is very close to the value of conventional coil springs made of steel. Furthermore, we measured the stiffness of a DLC nanospring annealed at 1000 in vacuum. The stiffness was decreased to approximately half of the stiffness of the nanospring without annealing.

This paper describes the experimental performance of eigenbeam multi-input multi-output with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems as measured in a testbed implemented with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The FPGA-testbed, characterized by the software-defined radio (SDR) technique, offers 1/5-scale real time signal processing. Extensive experiments on the testbed confirm the basic operation and performance of eigenbeam MIMO-OFDM with quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). From the packet error rate (PER) performance, we confirm that the eigenbeam 16QAM/MIMO-OFDM scheme with permutation matrix and three transmit antennas (Mt=3) drastically improves the required carrier-to-noise power ratio (CNR) by approximately 5.6 dB over the scheme without eigenbeam with Mt=2. Furthermore, to determine the impact of Doppler frequency fd, we focus on the transmission interval between the MIMO channel estimation and data transmission. To suppress the required CNR degradation to within 1.5 dB, it is found that the eigenbeam 16QAM/MIMO-OFDM scheme with permutation matrix and Mt=3 permits a transmission interval of approximately 68.5 ms when fd=1 Hz for a 1/5-scale model.

We propose a simple initial frame timing acquisition algorithm for cellular OFDMA systems. The proposed algorithm utilizes the 9 dB boost in preamble power set by the IEEE 802.16e standard. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm succeeds in acquiring the starting point of a frame under not only single cell but also multi-cell environments, while the conventional autocorrelation-based method fails under multi-cell environment.

A novel two-dimensional (2D) beam scanning antenna array using composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) is proposed. The antenna array consists of a set of CRLH LWAs and a Butler matrix (BM) feeding network. The direction of the beam can be scanned two-dimensionally in one plane by changing frequency and in the other plane by switching the input ports of the BM. A four-element antenna array in the microstrip line configuration operating at 10.5 GHz is designed with the assistance of full-wave simulations based on the method of moment (MoM) and the finite-element method (FEM). The antenna array is fabricated and radiation characteristics are measured. The wide range 2D beam scanning operation with the angle from -30 deg to +25 deg in one plane by sweeping frequency from 10.25 GHz to 10.7 GHz and with four discrete angles of -46 deg, -15 deg, +10 deg, and +35 deg in the other plane by switching the input port is achieved.