Recently, demand for multimedia service applicable with wireless ad hoc networks is increasing. Many protocols which support QoS (Quality of Service) defined by ITU H.323 are suitable for the system with a central coordinator (ex. access point), and are not applied to ad hoc networks. Since each mobile station sends a packet randomly in a wireless network, it is necessary to avoid a packet collision which results in the decrement of the channel throughput. IEEE 802.11 is a standard for wireless LANs. The basic access mechanism in its media access control (MAC) protocol is the distributed coordination function (DCF) based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). However, this mechanism does not have QoS control, and packet collision may occur frequently with the increase of the number of mobile stations. In this paper, the two queues, voice over IP (VoIP) queue and DATA queue, are set in each mobile station, and we propose a novel MAC protocol using multiple queues for QoS. Our scheme consists of carrier sensing, packet scheduling and collision avoidance, and improves the contention window in DCF. We use two kinds of packet scheduling. One is the scheduling in a mobile station, and the other is the scheduling among mobile stations. We called the proposed scheduling among mobile stations D2VTS (Distributed Double Virtual Time Scheduling). Simulations are conducted to analyze the proposed scheme. The simulation results show that our scheme is able to carry multimedia traffic with a higher performance compared with the conventional DCF.

In this paper, we present a new soft-decision iterative decoding algorithm using an efficient minimum distance search (MDS) algorithm. The proposed MDS algorithm is a top-down and recursive MDS algorithm, which finds a most likely codeword among the codewords at the minimum distance of the code from a given codeword. A search is made in each divided section by a "call by need" from the upper section. As a consequence, the search space and computational complexity are reduced significantly. The simulation results show that the proposed decoding algorithm achieves near error performance to the maximum likelihood decoding for any RM code of length 128 and suboptimal for the (256, 37), (256, 93) and (256, 163) RM codes.

The effect of NiP as a seed layer for the [Co/Pd]n multilayer perpendicular recording media was studied. It was found that a thin layer of 2 nm NiP inserted between the FeCoC soft magnetic underlayer and the [Co/Pd]n recording layer improved the magnetic properties such as coercivity, squareness and nucleation field. These improvements may be due to the enhanced grain isolation promoted by the NiP seed layer, as well as the lower surface roughness of the NiP seed layer. Read/write test using Guzik spin stand with a ring-type head showed a D50 value 220 kFCI in the roll-off curve. The magnetic transitions recorded up to 390 kFCI for [Co/Pd]n media with the NiP seed layer can be observed clearly with MFM.

One of the reasons of slow convergence in Backpropagation learning is the diminishing value of the derivative of the commonly used activation functions as the nodes approach extreme values, namely, 0 or 1. In this letter, we propose arctangent activation function to accelerate learning speed. Simulation results indicate considerable improvement in convergence performance.

A debug system for heterogeneous multiple processors in a single chip has been developed. The system consists of the debug interface circuit integrated on the chip, the interface circuit board between the chip and PC, and the debug software implemented on a PC. This debug system has been designed for a multimedia communication processor, which includes an original video processor core, a RISC processor, and a DSP. The RISC processor controls the Video Processing Unit that includes an original video processor and other hardware functions. While in debug mode, the external debugger can control the Video Processing Unit in the same manner as the RISC processor. The JTAG based interface circuit contains registers for bus transaction for command, address, and data to be written, etc. and a bus transaction sequencer. In fact, this system can realize the same bus transaction control as the RISC processor's. By applying proposed debug system, simultaneous debug of the RISC Processing Unit and the Video Processing Unit can be realized. This allows problems to be investigated more quickly and the total time required for debugging is efficiently reduced. Without this technology an estimated 19 weeks is required to debug the chip, whereas use of this technology allowed debugging to be completed in 9 weeks.

A fast capture algorithm of the initial attitude is proposed for the spacecraft using reaction wheels. This algorithm is composed of two steps. The first step deals with absorption of the initial angular momentum of the spacecraft into the reaction wheels and the second step a rest-to-reset large angle maneuver for sun tracking. A criterion of the initial attitude capture and a controller for the fast large angle maneuver method are presented under considering constraints of the reaction wheels. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has several advantages of the initial attitude capture and fast large angle maneuver. This algorithm can be applied to the near minimum time rotation control of the spacecraft.

A new error correction block based Hybrid ARQ protocol, in which PHY layer packets are composed of multiple error correction blocks, is devised together with a retransmission control scheme constructed on the basis of these error correction blocks. This protocol is designed dedicatedly for mobile AV stations to provide the high quality digital video transmission through a radio channel. To analyze the performance of this protocol, the frame loss rate vs. the uncorrectable error probability is simulated, in comparison with the ordinary packet based retransmission control. A wireless video transmission system using IEEE802.11b PHY is also described, which has been developed with the use of a Medium Access Control (MAC) LSI to perform the proposed protocol.

This paper investigates the effect of fast cell selection (FCS) associated with fast packet scheduling methods and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) with Chase combining, in which the optimum cell (or sector) transmitting a slot-assigned downlink shared channel (DSCH) is selected based on the received signal-to-interference power ratio (SIR), in high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA). The Round robin (RR), Proportional fairness (PF) and Maximum carrier-to-interference power ratio (CIR) schedulers are used as the scheduling algorithm. The simulation results elucidate that although almost no additional diversity gain through FCS is obtained for the PF and Maximum CIR schedulers, the improvement in throughput by FCS coupled with the RR scheduler is achieved. Furthermore, we elucidate that the effect of FCS is small when only inter-sector FCS is performed; however, inter-cell FCS is effective in improving the radio link throughput for the access users with a lower received SIR near the cell edge. The radio link throughput at the cumulative distribution of 20% of soft handover users when both inter-sector and inter-cell FCS are performed is increased by approximately 20% and 60% for PF and RR schedulers, respectively, compared to that without FCS, i.e. with hard handover. We also show that when a traffic model such as the modified ETSI WWW browsing model is taken into account, the effect of FCS associated with the decreasing effect of fast packet scheduling is greater than that assuming continuous packet transmission. The user throughput at the cumulative distribution of 20% employing both inter-sector and inter-cell FCS is increased by approximately 60% compared to that without FCS.

A duration modeling technique is proposed for the HMM based connected digit recognizer. The proposed duration modeling technique uses a cumulative duration probability. The cumulative duration probability is defined as the partial sum of the duration probabilities which can be estimated from the training speech data. Two approaches of using it are presented. First, the cumulative duration probability is used as a weighting factor to the state transition probability of HMM. Second, it replaces the conventional state transition probability. In both approaches, the cumulative duration probability is combined directly to the Viterbi decoding procedure. A modified Viterbi decoding procedure is also presented. One of the advantages of the proposed duration modeling technique is that the cumulative duration probability rules the transitions of states and words at each frame. Therefore, an additional post-procedure is not required. The proposed technique was examined by recognition experiments on Korean connected digit. Experimental results showed that two approach achieved almost same performances and that the average recognition accuracy was enhanced from 83.60% to 93.12%.

We have experimentally observed the dynamics of laser outputs in a microchip laser with frequency-modulated feedback light. We have observed rich dynamics that can be interpreted as three types of dynamics at different frequencies: (1) periodic bursts at twice of the frequency of the modulation of the external mirror, (2) chaotic pulsations at the relaxation oscillation frequency, and (3) clusters at the instantaneous Doppler-shifted frequency. We have confirmed these rich dynamics by using numerical simulations.

A voltage-mode universal biquadratic filter using single current-feedback amplifier (CFA), two capacitors and three resistors is presented. The new circuit has four inputs and one output and can realize all the standard filter functions, that is, lowpass, bandpass, highpass, notch and allpass filters, without changing the circuit topology. The use of only one current-feedback amplifier simplifiers the configuration.

In this paper, we present an efficient VLSI architecture for the stand-alone application of a speech recognition system based on discriminative Bayesian neural network (DBNN). Regarding the recognition phase, the architecture of the Bayesian distance unit (BDU) is constructed first. In association with the BDU, we propose a template-serial architecture for the path distance accumulation to perform the recognition procedure. A corresponding architecture is also developed to accelerate the discriminative training procedure. It contains the intelligent look-up table for the sigmoid function. In comparison to the traditional one-table method, the memory size reduces drastically with only slight loss of accuracy. Combining the proposed hardware accelerators with the cost efficient programmable core, we took the most out of both programmable and application-specific architectures, including performance, design complexity, and flexibility.

We show a method to determine a Steiner Minimum Tree (SMT) and a necessary and sufficient condition that an SMT is a full Steiner tree for three given points in -geometry ( = 3m, m is a positive integer). The -geometry allows only orientations with angles i/ (i and ( 2) are integers), and fill up the gap between the rectilinear geometry ( = 2) and the Euclidean geometry ( = ). An SMT in -geometry ( = 3m) has a similar property to that in the Euclidean geometry. The method to determine an SMT in -geometry is an extension of the well-known method in the Euclidean geometry. The Steiner point in -geometry is any point in the intersection area with a parallelogram and a Steiner locus. Then there are infinite candidate locations of the Steiner point. The Steiner point in the Euclidean geometry is that in -geometry ( = 3m).

In this paper, we propose a novel higher order time-frequency distribution (GDH) for a discrete time signal. This distribution is defined over the original discrete time-frequency grids through a delicate discretization of an equivalent expression of a higher order distribution, for a continuous time signal, in [4]. We also present a constructive design method, for the kernel of the GDH, by which the distribution satisfies (i) the alias free condition as well as (ii) the marginal conditions. Numerical examples show that the proposed distributions reasonably suppress the artifacts which are observed severely in the Wigner distribution and its simple higher order generalization.

We propose a buffer management mechanism, called V-WFQ (Virtual Weighted Fair Queueing), for achieving an approximately fair allocation of bandwidth with a small amount of hardware in a high-speed network. The basic process for the allocation of bandwidth uses selective packet dropping that compares the measured input rate of the flow with an estimated fair share of bandwidth. Although V-WFQ is a hardware-efficient FIFO-based algorithm, it achieves almost ideal fairness in bandwidth allocation. V-WFQ can be implemented in the high-speed core routers of today's IP backbone networks to provide various high-quality services. We have investigated V-WFQ's performance in terms of fairness and link utilization through extensive simulation. The results of simulation show that V-WFQ achieves a good balance between fairness and link utilization under various simulation conditions.

Recently there has been increased attention to the causality among biomedical signals. The causality between brain structures involved in the generation of alpha activity is examined based on EEG signals acquired simultaneously in the frontal and occipital regions of the scalp. The concept of directed coherence (DC) is introduced as a means of resolving two-signal observations into the constituent components of original signals, the interaction between signals and the influence of one signal source on the other, through autoregressive modeling. The technique was applied to EEG recorded from 11 normal subjects with eyes closed. Through an analysis of the directed coherence, it was found that in both the left and right hemispheres, alpha rhythms with relatively low frequency had a significantly higher correlation in the frontal-occipital direction than in the opposite direction. In the upper alpha frequency band, a significantly higher DC was observed in the occipital-frontal direction, and the right-left DC in the occipital area was consistently higher. The activity of rhythms near 10 Hz was widespread. These results suggest that there is a difference in the genesis and the structure of information transmission in the lower and upper band, and for 10-Hz alpha waves.

In this letter we present a new way for computing generalized eigenvalue problems in engineering applications. To transform a generalized eigenvalue problem into an associated problem for solving nonlinear dynamic equations by using optimization techniques, we can determine all eigenvalues and their eigenvectors for general complex matrices. Numerical examples are given to verify the formula of dynamic equations.

The Fat-Btree which is a new parallel B-tree structure has been proposed to improve the access performance of shared-nothing parallel database systems. Since the Fat-Btree has only a part of index nodes on each processing element, it can reduce the synchronization cost in update operations. For these reasons, both retrieval and update operations can be processed at high throughput compared to previously proposed parallel B-tree structures for shared-nothing computers. Though we tried to apply some conventional concurrency control methods to the Fat-Btree, e.g., B-OPT and ARIES/IM, which were designed for shared-everything machines, we found that these methods are not always appropriate for the Fat-Btree. In this paper, it is shown that the conventional methods are not suitable for the Fat-Btree and other parallel B-trees. We propose a new deadlock free concurrency control protocol, named INC-OPT, to improve the performance of the Fat-Btree more effectively than the B-OPT and ARIES/IM. Furthermore, in order to prove that the Fat-Btree provides the impact on the performance of shared-nothing parallel databases, we compare the real performance of three types of parallel B-tree structures, Fat-Btree, Copy-Whole-Btree, and Single-Index-Btree, on an nCUBE3 machine where the INC-OPT is applied.

Experiments were conducted to examine an approach from language modeling side to improving noisy speech recognition performance. By adopting appropriate word strings as new units of processing, speech recognition performance was improved by acoustic effects as well as by test-set perplexity reduction. Three kinds of word string language models were evaluated, whose additional lexical entries were selected based on combinations of part of speech information, word length, occurrence frequency, and log likelihood ratio of the hypotheses about the bigram frequency. All of the three word string models reduced errors in broadcast news speech recognition, and also lowered test-set perplexity. The word string model based on log likelihood ratio exhibited the best improvement for noisy speech recognition, by which deletion errors were reduced by 26%, substitution errors by 9.3%, and insertion errors by 13%, in the experiments using the speaker-dependent, noise-adapted triphone. Effectiveness of word string models on error reduction was more prominent for noisy speech than for studio-clean speech.

Leakage loss of Conductor Backed Coplanar Waveguide (CBCPW) with air-gap-spacing (AGS) dielectric sheets has been analyzed by using the hybrid 2D-FDTD Method and curve-fitting procedure. From numerical results, the proposed CBCPW with AGS dielectric sheets shows even lower leakage loss characteristics than those of conventional and double-layered one over a wide range of operating frequency. Furthermore, the possibility of the optimum air-gap width for leakage loss has been confirmed.