We aim to establish a highly efficient transmitting power control (TPC) scheme suitable for the reverse link of high-speed CDMA packet communication systems. Reservation-based access is assumed to be used for packet transmission in the reverse link. First, we describe a hybrid TPC that we created to cope with average interference changes. The target receiving power in the hybrid TPC is set according to the interference averaged over a comparatively long period of time. We show, using experiments on our high-speed packet communication experimental system, that hybrid TPC can effectively reduce transmission power consumption and PER compared with basic receiving power based TPC. Furthermore, we need to change the transmitting power according to the instantaneous interference to cope with instantaneous interference changes slot by slot. However, in a high-speed packet communication system, the interference level can change dramatically in a very short period of time. The TPC of cdma2000 or W-CDMA cannot efficiently cope with rapidly and greatly changing interference levels. Therefore, we created another two novel TPCs. Interference is divided in these TPCs into intra-cell and inter-cell interference. The supposed inter-cell interference level is changed according to the change in the probability distribution of the inter-cell interference, and the necessary transmitting power for a packet is calculated based on intra-cell allocation information and the supposed inter-cell interference level. Computer simulations show that, with the proposed TPCs, throughput can be increased by more than 200% compared with the type of TPC used in cdma2000 or W-CDMA, and the transmitting power consumption in a mobile host (MH) can also be vastly reduced.

A polarization-independent liquid crystal (LC) grating with a microscale LC molecular alignment pattern is proposed. The microscale LC alignment pattern is achieved using a microrubbing technique. The optical properties of the proposed LC grating are theoretically discussed in detail using Jones matrix method. Optimum condition for obtaining maximum +1st or -1st diffraction efficiencies is derived. The diffraction efficiency of the LC grating is measured and the diffraction efficiency characteristics are compared with the theoretical result. Furthermore, the dependence of the polarization direction of the incident light on the diffraction efficiency is discussed.

Software defined radio (SDR) mobile terminals that can access multiple wireless communication systems are the trend of the future. An SDR wideband mobile terminal must be capable of high-speed data processing and low power consumption. We focused on reconfigurable processors with these features. To evaluate the performance of reconfigurable processors for SDR wideband mobile terminals, we developed and evaluated software that runs on a reconfigurable processor for the IEEE 802.11a wireless local area network (LAN) baseband part, which requires high-speed data processing. This paper describes the configuration of the SDR IEEE 802.11a software for the reconfigurable processor and its performance evaluation results. Moreover, we showed the requirements for applying the reconfigurable processor to SDR wideband mobile terminals, and confirmed that the reconfigurable processor could be applied to SDR mobile terminals by slight progresses.

In 2002, Zhu et al. proposed a password-based authenticated key exchange protocol based on RSA. Zhu et al. claimed the protocol is efficient for the low-power devices in wireless networks. Unfortunately, Yeh et al. pointed out that Zhu et al.'s protocol was weak against undetectable on-line password guessing attack. Not only that, Zhu et al.'s protocol does not achieve explicit key authentication. At the same time, Yeh et al. proposed an improved method. However, in this paper, we shall point out that Yeh et al.'s improvement is vulnerable to the off-line password guessing attack. At the same time, we shall propose a solution to resist the above attack.

This paper proposes two different packet schedulers for IEEE 802.16e type time division duplex - orthogonal frequency division multiple access (TDD-OFDMA), which are the weighted fair scheduling (WFS) and the throughput guarantee scheduling (TGS). The performance of proposed schedulers is compared to those of some of conventional schedulers such as round robin (RR), proportional fair (PF), fast fair throughput (FFTH), and fair throughput (FTH) in terms of service coverage, effective throughput and fairness at 64 kbps and 128 kbps minimum user throughput requirements. For a relatively smaller throughput (64 kbps) requirement, the proposed schedulers increase the number of users per sector within 95% service coverage while satisfying the 1xEV-DV fairness criterion. For a relatively larger throughput (128 kbps) requirement, the proposed schedulers provide higher coverage than the PF scheduler while maintaining the same effective aggregate throughput.

This paper describes an approach to generating speech with emotional expressivity and speaking style variability. The approach is based on a speaking style and emotional expression modeling technique for HMM-based speech synthesis. We first model several representative styles, each of which is a speaking style and/or an emotional expression, in an HMM-based speech synthesis framework. Then, to generate synthetic speech with an intermediate style from representative ones, we synthesize speech from a model obtained by interpolating representative style models using a model interpolation technique. We assess the style interpolation technique with subjective evaluation tests using four representative styles, i.e., neutral, joyful, sad, and rough in read speech and synthesized speech from models obtained by interpolating models for all combinations of two styles. The results show that speech synthesized from the interpolated model has a style in between the two representative ones. Moreover, we can control the degree of expressivity for speaking styles or emotions in synthesized speech by changing the interpolation ratio in interpolation between neutral and other representative styles. We also show that we can achieve style morphing in speech synthesis, namely, changing style smoothly from one representative style to another by gradually changing the interpolation ratio.

This paper proposes a novel speech synthesis method to generate human-like natural speech. The conventional unit-selection-based synthesis method selects speech units from a large database, and concatenates them with or without modifying the prosody to generate synthetic speech. This method features highly human-like voice quality. The method, however, has a problem that a suitable speech unit is not necessarily selected. Since the unsuitable speech unit selection causes discontinuity between the consecutive speech units, the synthesized speech quality deteriorates. It might be considered that the conventional method can attain higher speech quality if the database size increases. However, preparation of a larger database requires a longer recording time. The narrator's voice quality does not remain constant throughout the recording period. This fact deteriorates the database quality, and still leaves the problem of unsuitable selection. We propose the plural unit selection and fusion method which avoids this problem. This method integrates the unit fusion used in the unit-training-based method with the conventional unit-selection-based method. The proposed method selects plural speech units for each segment, fuses the selected speech units for each segment, modifies the prosody of the fused speech units, and concatenates them to generate synthetic speech. This unit fusion creates speech units which are connected to one another with much less voice discontinuity, and realizes high quality speech. A subjective evaluation test showed that the proposed method greatly improves the speech quality compared with the conventional method. Also, it showed that the speech quality of the proposed method is kept high regardless of the database size, from small (10 minutes) to large (40 minutes). The proposed method is a new framework in the sense that it is a hybrid method between the unit-selection-based method and the unit-training-based method. In the framework, the algorithms of the unit selection and the unit fusion are exchangeable for more efficient techniques. Thus, the framework is expected to lead to new synthesis methods.

Document merging is essential to synchronizing several versions of a document concurrently edited by two or more users. A few methods for merging structured documents have been proposed so far, and yet the methods may not always merge given documents appropriately. As an aid for finding an appropriate merging, using another approach we propose a polynomial-time algorithm for merging structured documents. In the approach, we merge given two documents (treated as ordered trees) by optimally transforming the documents into isomorphic ones, using operations such as add (add a new node), del (delete an existing node), and upd (make two nodes have the same label).

In this paper the spectral density of the additive jitter noise in continuous time (CT) Delta-Sigma modulators (DSM) is derived analytically. Making use of the analytic results, extracted in this paper, a novel method for elimination of the damaging effects of the clock jitter in continuous time Delta-Sigma modulators is proposed. In this method instead of the conventional waveforms used in the feedback path of CT DSM's such as the non return to-zero, the return to-zero, and the half delay return to-zero, an impulse waveform is employed.

The requirement for achieving the smoothness of mode transit between track seeking and track following has become a challenging issue for hard disk drive (HDD) motion control. In this paper, a random-optimization-based self-organizing neuro-fuzzy controller (RO-SNFC) for HDD servo system is presented. The proposed controller is composed of three designs. First, the concept of pseudo-errors is used to detect the potential dynamics of the unknown plant for rule extraction. Second, the propensity of the obtained pseudo-errors is specified by a cubic regression model, with which the cluster-based self-organization is implemented to generate clusters. The generated clusters are regarded as the antecedents of the T-S fuzzy "IF-THEN" rules. The initial knowledge base of the RO-SNFC is established. Third, the well-known random optimization (RO) algorithm is used to evolve the controller parameters for control efficiency and robustness. In this paper, a motion reference curve for HDD read/write head is employed. With the reference velocity curve, the RO-SNFC is used to achieve the optimal positioning control. From the illustrations, the feasibility of the proposed approach for HDD servo systems is demonstrated. Through the comparison to other approaches, the excellent performance by the proposed approach in access time and positioning smoothness is observed.

A novel evolutionary algorithm is described for designing the topology of spanning tree-based communication networks. Two specific performance objectives are dealt with: the optimum communication spanning tree problem (OCSTP), and the quadratic minimum spanning tree problem (q-MST). Improved network performance is reliably obtained when using the proposed algorithm on accepted benchmark instances, in comparison with the previous best-known approaches. The same methodology can be applied straightforwardly to the design of communication networks with other objectives.

In this letter, we propose an enhanced gentle distributed coordination function (GDCF), which is a simple and effective collision resolution mechanism, to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF. We compare performance of the enhanced GDCF with that of the legacy DCF and the conventional GDCF via analysis and simulations. The enhanced GDCF introduces a new counter to check the number of consecutively successful transmissions, and the maximum permitted values of the counter differ for different backoff stages. The proposed GDCF is shown to have performance superior to that of the conventional GDCF for various combinations of contending stations and frame length.

Asymmetric slope differential CMOS (ASD-CMOS) and asymmetric slope differential dynamic logic (ASDDL) surpass the highest speed that conventional CMOS logic circuits can achieve, resulting from deeply shortened rise time along with relatively prolonged fall time. ASD-CMOS is a static logic and ASDDL is a dynamic logic without per-gate synchronous clock signal, each of which needs two-phase operation as well as differential signaling, however, interleaved precharging hides the prolonged fall time and BDD-based compound logic design mitigates area increase. ASD-CMOS 16-bit multiplier in a 0.18-µm CMOS technology demonstrates 1.78 nsec per an operation, which reaches 34% reduction of the best delay time achieved by a multiplier using a CMOS standard cell library that is conventional yet tuned to the optimum in energy-delay products. ASDDL can be superior to DCVS-DOMINO circuits not only in delay time but also in area and even in power. ASDDL 16-bit multiplier achieves delay and power reduction of 4% and 20%, respectively, compared with DCVS-DOMINO realization. A prototype ASD-CMOS 16-bit multiplier with built-in test circuitry fabricated in a 0.13-µm CMOS technology operates with the delay time of 1.57 nsec at 1.2 V.

Phonetic transcription of text is an indispensable component of text-to-speech (TTS) systems and is used in acoustic modeling for speech recognition and other natural language processing applications. One approach to the transcription of written text into phonetic entities or sounds is to use a set of well-defined context and language-dependent rules. The process of transcribing text into sounds starts by preprocessing the text and representing it by lexical items to which the rules are applicable. The rules can be segregated into phonemic and phonetic rules. Phonemic rules operate on graphemes to convert them into phonemes. Phonetic rules operate on phonemes and convert them into context-dependent phonetic entities with actual sounds. Converting from written text into actual sounds, developing a comprehensive set of rules, and transforming the rules into implementable algorithms for any language cause several problems that have their origins in the relative lack of correspondence between the spelling of the lexical items and their sound contents. For Standard Malay (SM) these problems are not as severe as those for languages of complex spelling systems, such as English and French, but they do exist. In this paper, developing a comprehensive computerized system for processing SM text and transcribing it into phonetic entities and evaluating the performance of this system, irrespective of the application, is discussed. In particular, the following issues are dealt with in this paper: (1) the spelling and other problems of SM writing and their impact on converting graphemes into phonemes, (2) the development of a comprehensive set of grapheme-to-phoneme rules for SM, (3) a description of the phonetic variations of SM or how the phonemes of SM vary in context and the development of a set of phoneme-to-phonetic transcription rules, (4) the formulation of the phonemic and phonetic rules into algorithms that are applicable to the computer-based processing of input SM text, and (5) the evaluation of the performance of the process of converting SM text into actual sounds by the above mentioned methods.

Most of analytical models proposed so far for the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) focus on saturation performance. In this paper, we develop an analytic model for unsaturation performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.11 DCF with and without slow contention window decrease (SCWD). The model explicitly takes into account the carrier sensing mechanism and an additional backoff interval after successful frame transmission, both of which can be ignored under saturation conditions. Expressions are derived for throughput and delay characteristics by means of the equilibrium point analysis. The accuracy of our model is validated through computer simulation. Numerical results based on the IEEE 802.11b with CCK show that the SCWD can stably achieve approximately 20% performance gain over the normal 802.11 DCF under unsaturation conditions as well as saturation ones.

This paper proposes a Generalized Traffic Engineering Protocol (GTEP). GTEP is a protocol that permits communication between a Path Computation Element (PCE) and a Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) controller (CNTL). The latter is hosted by each GMPLS node; it handles GMPLS and MPLS protocols such as routing and signaling protocols as well as controlling the GMPLS node host. The PCE provides multi-layer traffic engineering; it calculates Label Switched Path (LSP) routes and judges whether a new lower-layer LSP should be established. GTEP functions are implemented in both the PCE and GMPLS router. We demonstrate a multi-layer traffic engineering experiment conducted with GTEP.

The purpose of this paper is to improve a feedback-type adaptive array antenna (AAA) with feedback information quantized by one bit which was presented recently on TDMA system by an author of this paper. The improvement is made by using adaptive, instead of constant, update size of adaptive antenna weights control. Computer simulation results show that the performance of this system is improved to be almost equivalent to the performance of a system without quantization of the feedback information for wide range of fading speed. The results include the effect of control delay time and the maximum Doppler frequency under flat fading and frequency-selective fading.

Interactive multimedia applications (IMAs) require not only adequate bandwidth to support large volume data transmission but also bounded end-to-end transmission delay between end users. This study proposes a Delay and Degree constrained Multicasting Spanning Tree (D2MST) algorithm to build an any-to-any share tree for IMAs. D2MST comprises root selection and spanning tree generation. A weighting function is defined based on the novel concept of network center and gravity to choose the root of a share tree. From the root, a spanning tree is built by incrementally connecting nodes with larger "power" to the tree so that the degree constraint is satisfied. Simulation results show that D2MST can successfully generate a Δ-constraint MST in which a high percentage of nodes can interact within the bounded delay.

Some cryptographic schemes based on the bilinear pairings were proposed recently. In this paper, we apply the pairings on elliptic curve and Elliptic Curve Cryptography to the key agreement of dynamic peer group. Each member performs authentication and contributes a secret data to negotiate a group common key by means of a binary key tree. The proposed protocol does not need a dedicated central server to perform the key agreement, and the overhead is distributed among the group members. To provide a secure dynamic group communication, the key renewing mechanism has to be included. While the member joins/leaves, the group session key will be renewed to provide the backward/forward privacy, respectively. The key renewing is much efficient because it is only confined to the keys of the key-path. The proposed protocol is flexible while the change of membership is frequent.

In this paper, a multi-Gbps pre-emphasis design methodology and circuits for a 4/2 Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) transmitter of high-speed data serial link over cable are proposed. Theoretically analysis of the total frequency response including pre-emphasis, package, cable loss and termination are first carried out. In order to gain higher data rates without increasing of symbol rate, we use 4 PAM in our system. Then, we propose a pre-emphasis architecture and algorithm that can enlarge the high frequency response so the overall frequency response in the receiver side is uniform within the desired frequency range. The overall circuit is implemented in TSMC 0.18 µm 1P6M 1.8 V CMOS process. A test chip of this transmitter with pre-emphasis, PLL circuit and on-chip termination resistors is implemented by full custom flow to verify the design methodology. The measurement results of 10/5 Gbps (4/2 PAM) are carried out over 5 meter (m) long cable and is in agreement with our analysis and simulation results.