High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest video coding standard that is supported by JCT-VC. In this letter, an encoding algorithm for early termination of Coding Unit (CU) and Prediction Unit (PU) based on the texture direction is proposed for the HEVC intra prediction. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides an average 40% total encoding time reduction with the negligible loss of rate-distortion.

Mobile IPv6 is an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard which permits node mobility in IPv6. To manage mobility, it establishes a centralized mediator, Home Agent (HA), which inevitably introduces several penalties like triangular routing, single point of failure and limited scalability. Some later extensions such as Global HAHA, which employed multiple HAs, made to alleviate above shortcomings by introducing Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) approach. However, Multiple HA model will not be beneficial, unless the HAs are located finely. But, no major research paper has focused on locating HAs. This paper examines impact of single and multiple HA placements in data plane, by using an Autonomous System (AS) level topology consisting of 30,000 nodes with several evaluation criteria. All possible placements of HA(s) are analysed on a fair, random set of 30,000 node pairs of Mobile Nodes (MN) and Correspondent Nodes (CN). Ultimate result provides a concise account of different HA placements: i.e. cost centrality interprets performance variation better than degree centrality or betweenness. 30,000 ASs are classified into three groups in terms of Freeman's closeness index and betweenness centrality: 1) high range group, 2) mid range group, and 3) low range group. Considering dual HA placement, if one HA is placed in an AS in the high range group, then any subsequent HA placement gives worse results, thus single HA placement is adequate. With the mid range group, similar results are demonstrated by the upper portion of the group, but the rest yields better results when combined with another HA. Finally, from the perspective of low range group, if the subsequent HA is placed in the high range group, it gives better result. On the other hand, betweenness based grouping yields varying results. Consequently, this study reveals that the Freeman's closeness index is most appropriate in determining impacts of HA placements among considered indices.

News articles usually represent a biased viewpoint on contentious issues, potentially causing social problems. To mitigate this media bias, we propose a novel framework for predicting orientation of a news article by analyzing social user behaviors in Twitter. Highly active users tend to have consistent behavior patterns in social network by retweeting behavior among users with the same viewpoints for contentious issues. The bias ratio of highly active users is measured to predict orientation of users. Then political orientation of a news article is predicted based on the bias ratio of users, mutual retweeting and opinion analysis of tweet documents. The analysis of user behavior shows that users with the value of 1 in bias ratio are 88.82%. It indicates that most of users have distinctive orientation. Our prediction method based on orientation of users achieved 88.6% performance in accuracy. Experimental results show significant improvements over the SVM classification. These results show that proposed detection method is effective in social network.

This paper proposes out-of-band emission reduction schemes for IEEE 802.11af based Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) systems operating in TV White Spaces (TVWS). IEEE 802.11af adopts Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) to exploit the TVWS spectrum effectively. The combination of the OFDM and TVWS may be able to solve the problem of frequency depletion. However the TVWS transmitter must satisfy a strict transmission spectrum mask and reduce out-of-band emission to protect the primary users. The digital convolution filter is one way of reducing the out-of-band emission. Unfortunately, implementing a strict mask needs a large number of filter taps, which causes high implementation complexity. Time-domain windowing is another effective approach. This scheme reduces out-of-band emission with low complexity but at the price of shortening the effective guard interval. This paper proposes a mechanism that jointly uses these two schemes for out-of-band emission reduction. Moreover, the appropriate windowing duration design is proposed in terms of both the out-of-band emission suppression and throughput performance for all mandatory mode of IEEE 802.11af system. The proposed time-domain windowing design reduces the number of multiplier by 96.5%.

Demand for wireless communication is increasing significantly, but the frequency resources available for wireless communication are quite limited. Currently, various countries are prompting the use of TV white spaces (TVWS). IEEE 802.11 Working Group (WG) has started a Task Group (TG), namely IEEE 802.11af, to develop an international standard for Wireless local Area Networks (WLANs) in TVWS. In order to increase maximum throughput, a channel aggregation mechanism is introduced in the draft standard. In Japan, ISDB-T based area-one-segment broadcasting system (Area-1seg) which is a digital TV broadcast service in limited areas has been permitted to offer actual TVWS services since April 2012. The operation of the IEEE 802.11af system shall not jeopardize the Area-1seg system due to the common operating frequency band. If the Area-1seg partially overlaps with the IEEE 802.11af in some frequency, the IEEE 802.11af cannot use the channel aggregation mechanism due to a lack of channels. As a result, the throughput of the IEEE 802.11af deteriorates. In this paper, the physical layer of IEEE 802.11af D4.0 is introduced briefly, and a partial subcarrier system for IEEE 802.11af is proposed to efficiently use the TVWS spectrum. The IEEE 802.11af co-exist with the Area-1seg by using null subcarriers. Computer simulation shows up to around 70% throughput gain is achieved with the proposed mechanism.

A two-stage classifier is proposed that identifies criminal charges and a range of punishments given a set of case facts and attributes. Our supervised-learning model focuses only on the offences against life and body section of the criminal law code of Thailand. The first stage identifies a set of diagnostic issues from the case facts using a set of artificial neural networks (ANNs) modularized in hierarchical order. The second stage extracts a set of legal elements from the diagnostic issues by employing a set of C4.5 decision tree classifiers. These linked modular networks of ANNs and decision trees form an effective system in terms of determining power and the ability to trace or infer the relevant legal reasoning behind the determination. Isolated and system-integrated experiments are conducted to measure the performance of the proposed system. The overall accuracy of the integrated system can exceed 90%. An actual case is also demonstrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed system.

A high-speed and low-power 8-bit subranging analog-to-digital converter (ADC) based on 65-nm CMOS technology was fabricated. Rather than using digital foreground calibration, an analog-centric approach was adopted to reduce power dissipation. An offset cancelling charge-steering amplifier and capacitive-averaging technique effectively reduce the offset, noise, and power dissipation of the ADC. Moreover, the circuit used to compensate the kickback noise current from the comparator can also reduce the power dissipation. The reference-voltage generator for the fine ADC is composed of a fine ladder and a capacitor providing an AC signal path. This configuration reduces the power dissipation of the selection signal drivers for the analog multiplexer. A test chip fabricated using 65-nm digital CMOS technology achieved a high sampling rate of 1GHz, a low power dissipation of 17.5mW, and a figure of merit of 118fJ/conv.-step.

The emerging Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) architecture, which aims to provide critical traffic information and Internet services, has recently been standardized in the IEEE 802.11p specification. A typical WAVE network consists of one road-side-unit (RSU) and one or more on-board-units (OBUs), wherein the RSU supports one control channel (CCH) and one or more service channels (SCH) for the OBUs to access. Generally, an OBU is equipped with a single transceiver and needs to periodically switch between the CCH and one of the SCHs in order to receive emergency messages and service information from the CCH and to deliver Internet traffic over an SCH. Synchronizing all OBUs to alternatively access the CCH and SCHs is estimated to waste as much as 50% of the channel's resources. To improve efficiency, we propose an innovative scheme, namely coordinated interleaving access (CIA) scheme, which optimizes the SCH throughput by smartly grouping the OBUs to let them access the CCH and SCHs in an interleaved and parallel manner. To further the capability of CIA scheme, an enhanced version is also proposed to handle the case where OBUs with multiple transceivers. Performance analysis and evaluation indicates that the proposed CIA scheme achieves a significant improvement in resource. Thus it can be advantageous to adapt it into the IEEE 802.11p protocol for its adoption in multi-channel wireless vehicular networks.

A soft-decision recursive decoding algorithm (RDA) for the class of the binary linear block codes recursively generated using a u|u+v-construction method is proposed. It is well known that Reed-Muller (RM) codes are in this class. A code in this class can be decomposed into left and right components. At a recursive level of the RDA, if the component is decomposable, the RDA is performed for the left component and then for the cosets generated from the left decoding result and the right component. The result of this level is obtained by concatenating the left and right decoding results. If the component is indecomposable, a proposed iterative bounded-distance decoding algorithm is performed. Computer simulations were made to evaluate the RDA for RM codes over an additive white Gaussian-noise channel using binary phase-shift keying modulation. The results show that the block error rates of the RDA are relatively close to those of the maximum-likelihood decoding for the third-order RM code of length 26 and better than those of the Chase II decoding for the third-order RM codes of length 26 and 27, and the fourth-order RM code of length 28.

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have recently been playing an important role in communication. From the audience aspect, they enable audiences to get unlimited information via the information feeding mechanism (IFM), which is an important part of the OSNs. The audience relies on the quantity and quality of the information served by it. We found that existing IFMs can result in two problems: information overload and cultural ignorance. In this paper, we propose a new type of IFM that solves these problems. The advantage of our proposed IFM is that it can filter irrelevant information with consideration of audiences' culture by using the Naïve Bayes (NB) algorithm together with features and factors. It then dynamically serves interesting and important information based on the current situation and preference of the audience. This mechanism helps the audience to reduce the time spent in finding interesting information. It can be applied to other cultures, societies and businesses. In the near future, the audience will be provided with excellent, and less annoying, communication. Through our studies, we have found that our proposed IFM is most appropriate for Thai and some groups of Japanese audiences under the consideration of audiences' culture.

A 16×16-element corporate-feed waveguide slot array antenna in the 60-GHz band is designed to achieve broadband reflection and high antenna efficiency. The sub-arrays consisting of 2×2-elements are designed to improve the reflection bandwidth by implementing lower Q and triple resonance. The designed antenna is fabricated by diffusion bonding of thin copper plates. A wide reflection bandwidth with VSWR less than 2.0 is obtained over 21.5%, 13.2GHz (54.7-67.8GHz). The measured gain is 32.6dBi and the corresponding antenna efficiency is 76.5%. The broad bandwidth of more than 31.5-dBi gain is realized over 19.2%, 11.9GHz (56.1-68.0GHz). The gain in bandwidth covers the whole of the license-free 60-GHz band (57-66GHz).

Wireless access in the vehicular environment (WAVE) architecture of intelligent transportation system (ITS) has been standardized in the IEEE 802.11p specification and it is going to be widely deployed in many roadway environments in order to provide prompt emergency information and internet services. A typical WAVE network consists of a number of WAVE devices, in which one is the road-side-unit (RSU) and the others are on-board-units (OBUs), and supports one control channel (CCH) and one or more service channels (SCH) for OBU access. The CCH is used to transport the emergency messages and service information of SCHs and the SCHs could be used to carry internet traffic and non-critical safety traffic of OBUs. However, the IEEE 802.11p contention-based medium access control protocol would suffer degraded transmission efficiency if the number of OBUs contending on an SCH is large. Moreover, synchronizing all WAVE devices to periodically and equally access the CCH and an SCH will waste as much as 50% of the channel resources of the SCH [1]. As a solution, we propose an efficiency-improvement scheme, namely the agent-based coordination (ABC) scheme, which improves the SCH throughput by means of electing one OBU to be the agent to schedule the other OBUs so that they obtain the access opportunities on one SCH and access the other SCH served by RSU in a contention-free manner. Based on the ABC scheme, three different scheduling and/or relaying strategies are further proposed and compared. Numerical results and simulation results confirm that the proposed ABC scheme significantly promotes the standard transmission efficiency.

This paper proposes the state observer design for feedforward nonlinear systems with delayed output. It is shown that by using the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, the proposed design method ensures the asymptotic stability of estimation error for an arbitrarily large output delay. Finally, an illustrative example is given in order to show the effectiveness of our design method.

Security plays an important role in several ZigBee applications such as Smart Energy and medical sensor applications. For a secure communication among ZigBee devices, a secret key should be shared among any two ZigBee devices using the Key Distribution protocol. Recently, Yüksel and Nielson proposed a new Key Distribution protocol for ZigBee addressing the security weaknesses of the original ZigBee Key Distribution protocol. In this letter, it is shown that their protocol is not secure against a key de-synchronization attack, and a security-enhanced Key Distribution protocol is newly proposed and analyzed in terms of security.

In this paper, we study an objective quality measure that approximates the subjective mean opinion score (MOS) for bandwidth-extended wideband speech with respect to narrowband speech. Bandwidth-extended speech should be widely evaluated by a subjective quality assessment such as MOS. However, such subjective quality assessments are expensive and time-consuming. This paper proposes a new objective quality measure that combines the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and spectral-distortion. We evaluated the correlation between our proposed scheme and MOS using AMR and AMR-WB speech codecs. The coefficient of correlation between the proposed scheme and the MOS value was found to be 0.973. We concluded that the proposed scheme is a valid and effective objective quality measure.

AC conversion has a huge variety of applications and so there are many ongoing research topics as in every type of power electronic conversion. New semiconductors allow the increase of the switching frequency fact that brings a whole new prospective improvement in converter's operation. Many other possible nonlinear operation regimes, including period doubling and chaotic oscillations, appear besides the conventional steady state operation. In this work, a nonlinear discrete-time model of an AC/AC buck type converter is proposed. A discrete time iterative map is derived to highlight the sensitive switching dynamics. The model is able to observe fast scale phenomena and short transient effects. It offers more information compared to other methods such as the averaging ones. According to Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) regulations, low wide-band noise is more acceptable than the high narrow-band, therefore the goal of this work is to spread the harmonic noise into a wide frequency spectrum which has lower amplitudes compared to the conventional comb-like spectrum with distinctive amplitudes at switching frequency multiples. Through the numerical and experimental consideration the converter can operate in a chaotic motion and the advantages of the performance improvement are also discussed.

Providing diverse Quality of Service (QoS) with ultra-low power consumption and support of mobility is the most important and challenging issue in wireless body area networks (WBANs). The IEEE 802.15.4 standard exhibits a desirable feature for WBAN, but its inability of mobility support makes it insufficient. In this paper, we show what is required for node mobility support and propose two strategies for the support. We observed that the amount of time required for the association process is the key reason IEEE 802.15.4 is unable to handle mobility. In this paper, we present a new fast association technique, which prevents nodes from scanning multiple channels. In the proposed scheme, by scanning just a single channel, a node can learn about all the coordinators working in different channels. The single channel scanning scheme is able to decrease the association time of IEEE 802.15.4 operating in 2.4GHz by 32 times. Furthermore, in this paper, a method to increase the node connectivity time with its coordinator in IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode is introduced. The method tries to anticipate whether the node is moving towards or away from the coordinator by analyzing the signal strength of multiple beacons received from the same coordinator. Thus, the connectivity time is increased by choosing the coordinator with good signal strength, but located both furthest from the node and toward the direction which mobile node is moving. Our approach results in significant improvement by reducing the number of times the moving node switches coordinators. Experimental results have verified that our schemes work well in the mobile sensor network environment.

A novel analog decoding method using only 90-degree phase shifters is proposed to simplify the decoding method for short-range multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. In a short-range MIMO transmission, an optimal element spacing that maximizes the channel capacity exists for a given transmit distance between the transmitter and receiver. We focus on the fact that the weight matrix by zero forcing (ZF) at the optimal element spacing can be obtained by using dividers and 90-degree phase shifters because it can be expressed by a unitary matrix. The channel capacity by the proposed method is next derived for the evaluation of the exact limitation of the channel capacity. Moreover, it is shown that an optimal weight when using directional antennas can be expressed by using only dividers, 90-degree phase shifters, and attenuators, regardless of the beam width of the directional antenna. Finally, bit error rate and channel capacity evaluations by both simulation and measurement confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We consider Monte Carlo tree search problem, a variant of Min-Max tree search problem where the score of each leaf is the expectation of some Bernoulli variables and not explicitly given but can be estimated through (random) playouts. The goal of this problem is, given a game tree and an oracle that returns an outcome of a playout, to find a child node of the root which attains an approximate min-max score. This problem arises in two player games such as computer Go. We propose a simple and efficient algorithm for Monte Carlo tree search problem.

Let G be a graph with a single source w, assigned a positive integer called the supply. Every vertex other than w is a sink, assigned a nonnegative integer called the demand. Every edge is assigned a positive integer called the capacity. Then a spanning tree T of G is called a spanning distribution tree if the capacity constraint holds when, for every sink v, an amount of flow, equal to the demand of v, is sent from w to v along the path in T between them. The spanning distribution tree problem asks whether a given graph has a spanning distribution tree or not. In the paper, we first observe that the problem is NP-complete even for series-parallel graphs, and then give a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to solve the problem for a given series-parallel graph G. The computation time is bounded by a polynomial in n and D, where n is the number of vertices in G and D is the sum of all demands in G.