The IEEE 802.11 distributed coordinated function (DCF) adopts carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) as its medium access control (MAC) protocol. CSMA/CA is designed such that the transmission from any one station does not have priority over any other. In a congested environment with many DCF stations, this design makes it difficult to protect channel resources for certain stations such as when products are used for presentation at exhibitions, which should be protected based on priority. On the other hand, The IEEE 802.11 enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) provides a quality-of-service (QoS) mechanism for DCF. However in EDCA, transmission opportunities are allocated based on not individual stations but on the defined traffic type of applications. This paper proposes a distributed dynamic resource allocation method that enables control of flexible bandwidth allocation to each specific station. The proposed method controls the priority level and can coexist with conventional CSMA/CA. Moreover, the proposed method improves the system throughput. Specifically, under the coexistence environment with DCF stations, the proposed method is able to obtain up to over 300% higher user throughput characteristic compared to the case in which the proposed method is not introduced. In addition, under non-coexistence environment, all the proposed stations achieve 70% higher throughput than DCF stations when the number of stations in a network is 50.

IEEE 802.11ac uses DL MU-MIMO and channelization for very high throughput. We propose a new algorithm for adaptive channelization in DL MU-MIMO WLANs. The proposed scheme can enhance the throughput efficiency for DL MU-MIMO transmission by adaptively applying the channelization scheme according to data size and MCS. Moreover, our proposal can reduce the overhead due to the exchange of control frames for DL MU-MIMO transmission in WLANs. A performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is superior to IEEE 802.11ac WLAN.

BitTorrent is one of the most popular P2P file sharing applications worldwide. Each BitTorrent network is called a swarm, and millions of peers may join multiple swarms. However, there are many unreachable peers (NATed (network address translated), firewalled, or inactive at the time of measurement) in each swarm; hence, existing techniques can only measure a part of all the peers in a swarm. In this paper, we propose an improved measurement method for BitTorrent swarms that include many unreachable peers. In essence, NATed peers and those behind firewalls are found by allowing them to connect to our crawlers by actively advertising our crawlers' addresses. Evaluation results show that the proposed method increases the number of unique contacted peers by 112% compared to the conventional method. Moreover, the proposed method increases the total volume of downloaded pieces by 66%. We investigate the sampling bias among the proposed and conventional methods, and we find that different measurement methods yield significantly different results.

In this paper, we give some results towards the conjecture that σ2t+1l-1,2t are the only nonlinear balanced elementary symmetric Boolean functions where t and l are positive integers. At first, a unified and simple proof of some earlier results is shown. Then a property of balanced elementary symmetric Boolean functions is presented. With this property, we prove that the conjecture is true for n=2m+2t-1 where m,t (m>t) are two non-negative integers, which verified the conjecture for a large infinite class of integer n.

Fast string matching is essential for deep packet inspection (DPI). Traditional string matchers cannot keep up with the continuous increases in data rates due to their natural speed limits. We add a multi-byte processing prefilter to the traditional string matcher to detect target patterns on a multiple character basis. The proposed winnowing prefilter significantly reduces the number of identity blocks, thereby reducing the memory requirements.

Recently, network coding (NC) has been popularly applied to wireless networks in order to improve scarce wireless capacity. In wireless LANs, NC can be applied to packet retransmission in which multiple packets can be simultaneously transmitted by a single transmission trial at a base station (BS). In this paper, we assume wireless LANs with QoS functionality and propose adaptive cooperation between NC and IEEE 802.11e EDCA. In EDCA, when network load is high, QoS is significantly degraded even for high priority class. To solve this, existing methods improve backoff control, and decrease packet loss caused by collision. However, this cannot prevent packet loss caused by channel fading. In the proposed cooperation between NC and EDCA, QoS of all priority classes is improved from the aspect of efficient loss recovery. Unlike NC method with no QoS control, we encounter transmission scheduling problem among an NC packet, a single lost packet and a new packet. Moreover, in the constitution of packets encoded into NC packet, packet's intrinsic priority should be considered. Therefore, we propose how to schedule the packets to be transmitted in BS, and how to constitute NC packets to be encoded. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by extensive computer simulations.

In our previous study, we proposed the waveform interpolation (WI) approach to model the excitation signals for hidden Markov model (HMM)-based speech synthesis. This letter presents several techniques to improve excitation modeling within the WI framework. We propose both the time domain and frequency domain zero padding techniques to reduce the spectral distortion inherent in the synthesized excitation signal. Furthermore, we apply non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to obtain a low-dimensional representation of the excitation signals. From a number of experiments, including a subjective listening test, the proposed method has been found to enhance the performance of the conventional excitation modeling techniques.

In our privious paper, we proposed an algorithm that determines delay times of a timed Petri net from the structural information of a signaling pathway, but Petri net structures containing cycles and inhibitory arcs were not considered. This paper provides conditions for cycle-contained Petri nets to have reasonable delay times. Furthermore, handling of inhibitory arcs are discussed in terms of the reaction rate of inhibitory interaction in signaling pathway, especially the conversion process of Petri net with inhibitory arc to the one without inhibitory arc is given.

Congestion inherently occurs on the Internet due to traffic concentration on certain nodes or links of networks. The traffic concentration is caused by inefficient use of topological information of networks in existing routing protocols, which reduces to inefficient mapping between traffic demands and network resources. Actually, the route with minimum cost, i.e., number of hops, selected as a transmission route by existing routing protocols would pass through specific nodes with common topological characteristics that could contribute to a large improvement in minimizing the cost. However, this would result in traffic concentration on such specific nodes. Therefore, we propose a measure of the distance between two nodes that is suitable for reducing traffic concentration on specific nodes. To consider the topological characteristics of the congestion points of networks, we define node-to-node distance by using a generalized norm, p-norm, of a vector of which elements are degrees of intermediate nodes of the route. Simulation results show that both the maximum Stress Centrality (SC) and the coefficient of variation of the SC are minimized in some network topologies by selecting transmission routes based on the proposed measure of node-to-node distance.

We evaluated the single side-band phase noise of a 40 GHz beat signal generated by two free-running lasers. This allowed us to verify the utility of the two free-running lasers is verified as a light source for a next-generation radio-over-fiber system using frequency such as those in the millimeter-wave and terahertz bands. We also measured the phase noise of a frequency quadrupler using a Mach-Zehnder modulator for comparison. The phase noise of the two free-running lasers and the frequency quadrupler are -63.85 and -95.22 dBc/Hz at a 10 kHz offset frequency, respectively.

The contradictions created by the differences in mass P2P data and transfer capability of wireless networks, and mismatch of overlay network topology and physical network topology are the main barriers hindering the implementation of P2P resource sharing in wireless multi-hop networks. This paper investigates the problem of enabling P2P resource sharing in WMNs with two-tier architecture. SpiralChord, the DHT approach implemented through routers in the upper tier, is proposed to address the major problems of wireless resource sharing – how to efficiently find resources currently available and reduce redundant messages as much as possible. SpiralChord uses an ID assignment technique to integrate location awareness with cross-layering. Location awareness aims at alleviating mismatch in physical network topology and overlay network topology, and it is designed to map neighboring routers to close-by IDs in the logical ring. Cross-layering aims at speeding up resource lookup operations in the application layer by exploiting the information that is available at the MAC layer, and it tends to be more effective when physically neighboring routers have faraway IDs in the logical ring. An ID assignment strategy based on spiral curve is proposed to meet the contradictory requirements of location awareness and cross-layering, mapping a peer's neighbors in the overlay network to peers which are its physical neighbors and distributing the remaining physical neighbors as widely as possible in the overlay network. In addition, a mobility management mechanism is proposed to address the adverse effect of the movements of clients in lower tier on resource sharing. A client is assigned a managing router to take the responsibility for the location of the client. Simulations show SpiralChord is more effective in reducing message overhead and increasing lookup performance than Chord, and mobility management for mobile clients performs well at reducing message overhead caused by mobile clients in SpiralChord.

High phase noise is a common problem in ring oscillators. Continuous conduction of the transistor in an analog tuning method degrades the phase noise of ring oscillators. In this paper, a digital control tuning which completely switches the transistors on and off, and a 1/f noise reduction technique are employed to reduce the phase noise. A 14-bit control signal is employed to obtain a small frequency step and a wide tuning range. Furthermore, multiphase ring oscillator with a sub-feedback loop topology is used to obtain a stable quadrature outputs with even number of stages and to increase the output frequency. The measured DCO has a frequency tuning range from 554 MHz to 2.405 GHz. The power dissipation is 112 mW from 1.8 V power supply. The phase noise at 4 MHz offset and 2.4 GHz center frequency is -134.82 dBc/Hz. The FoM is -169.9 dBc/Hz which is a 6.3 dB improvement over the previous oscillator design.

Tree partitioning arises in many parallel and distributed computing applications and storage systems. Some operator scheduling problems need to partition a tree into a number of vertex-disjoint subtrees such that some constraints are satisfied and some criteria are optimized. Given a tree T with each vertex or node assigned a nonnegative integer weight, two nonnegative integers l and u (l < u), and a positive integer p, we consider the following tree partitioning problems: partitioning T into minimum number of subtrees or p subtrees, with the condition that the sum of node weights in each subtree is at most u and at least l. To solve the two problems, we provide a fast polynomial-time algorithm, including a pre-processing method and another bottom-up scheme with dynamic programming. With experimental studies, we show that our algorithm outperforms another prior algorithm presented by Ito et al. greatly.

The present paper introduces a prototype design and experimental results for a multi-user MIMO linear precoding system. A base station and two mobile stations are implemented by taking full advantage of the software-defined radio. The base station consists of general purpose signal analyzers and signal generators controlled by a personal computer. Universal software radio peripherals are used as mobile stations. Linear spatial precoding and a simple two-way channel estimation technique are adopted in this experimental system. In-lab and field transmission experiments are carried out, and the bit error rate performance is evaluated. The impact of the channel estimation error under average channel gain discrepancy between two mobile stations is analyzed through computer simulations. Channel estimation error is shown to have a greater influence on the mobile station with the greater average channel gain.

The cryptographic algorithm called INCrypt32 is a MAC algorithm to authenticate participants, RFID cards and readers, in HID Global's iCLASS systems. HID's iCLASS cards are widely used contactless smart cards for physical access control. Although INCrypt32 is a heart of the security of HID's iCLASS systems, its security has not been evaluated yet since the specification has not been open to public. In this paper, we reveal the specification of INCrypt32 by reverse-engineering iCLASS cards and investigate the security of INCrypt32 with respect to the cryptographic sense. This result is the first work to describe the details of INCrypt32 and the possibility of a secret key (64-bit) recovery in our attack environments. 242 MAC queries are required in the real environment using secure communication protocols. But the required number of MAC queries decreases to 218 if MAC quires for chosen messages with arbitrary length can be requested.

We investigate the visibility of scrolling text presented nearby a dynamically moving image. In two experiments, we evaluate the subjective speed and readability of scrolled fake addresses presented immediately above a moving grating pattern that covers a large part of the visual field. The drift speed and direction of the grating were controlled to reveal the visibility of the text. The results show that the scrolling addresses exhibited slower subjective speed and better readability when the grating moved in the same direction as the scrolling addresses. On the contrary, faster subjective speed and worse readability of the scrolling addresses were raised by the grating moving in the opposite direction. The strength of these effects was dependent on the speed difference between the scrolling addresses and the grating. These results suggest that the visibility of the scrolling text, assessed in terms of subjective speed and readability, strongly depends on nearby moving images.

This letter proposes a multiuser switched scheduling scheme with per-user threshold and post user selection and provides a generic analytical framework for determining the optimal feedback thresholds. The proposed scheme applies an individual feedback threshold for each user rather than a single common threshold for all users to achieve some capacity gain due to the flexibility of threshold selection as well as a lower scheduling outage probability. In addition, since scheduling outage may occur with a non-negligible probability, the proposed scheme employs post user selection in order to further improve the ergodic capacity, where the user with the highest potential for a higher channel quality than other users is selected. Numerical and simulation results show that the capacity gain by post user selection is significant when random sequence is used.

In this letter, we propose a non-cooperative limited feedback precoding and subchannel selection scheme for non-reciprocal multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels. At each iteration of the proposed scheme, each user updates its precoder selection for each subchannel and then chooses the predetermined number of subchannels in a distributed and non-cooperative way. We present simulation results to verify the performance of the proposed scheme.

Facial micro-expressions are fast and subtle facial motions that are considered as one of the most useful external signs for detecting hidden emotional changes in a person. However, they are not easy to detect and measure as they appear only for a short time, with small muscle contraction in the facial areas where salient features are not available. We propose a new computer vision method for detecting and measuring timing characteristics of facial micro-expressions. The core of this method is based on a descriptor that combines pre-processing masks, histograms and concatenation of spatial-temporal gradient vectors. Presented 3D gradient histogram descriptor is able to detect and measure the timing characteristics of the fast and subtle changes of the facial skin surface. This method is specifically designed for analysis of videos recorded using a hi-speed 200 fps camera. Final classification of micro expressions is done by using a k-mean classifier and a voting procedure. The Facial Action Coding System was utilized to annotate the appearance and dynamics of the expressions in our new hi-speed micro-expressions video database. The efficiency of the proposed approach was validated using our new hi-speed video database.

We propose a new analytical method for a composite dielectric grating embedded with conducting strips using scattering factors in the shadow theory. The scattering factor in the shadow theory plays an important role instead of the conventional diffraction amplitude. By specifying the relation between scattering factors and spectral-domain Green's functions, we derive expressions of the Green's functions directly for unit surface electric and magnetic current densities, and apply the spectral Galerkin method to our formulation. From some numerical results, we show that the expressions of the Green's functions are valid, and analyze scattering characteristics by composite gratings.