We report a flexible and lightweight wearable microstrip antenna that can be sewn into clothing and hats. This antenna is composed of felt and a conductive woven fabric. Experimental results clearly show that this antenna operates normally as a conventional microstrip antenna, and is practical and feasible for personal satellite communications.

The present report introduces a new construction of sequences having both a low peak factor (crest factor) and a flat power spectrum. Since the proposed sequence has a flat power spectrum, its auto-correlation is zero except for the zero shift. The proposed construction uses a systematic scheme and no search method. The length of the proposed sequence is (2n+1)(4n+1) for an arbitrary integer n. The sequence construction presented herein provides a means for generating various sequences at the lengths required for such applications as system measurement (which requires uncorrelated test signals), and audio signal processing for sound production (for enhancing spatial imagery in stereo signals synthesized from mono sources).

Decision-directed, pilot-symbol-aided channel estimation (PSACE) for coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (COFDM) systems has structurally unavoidable processing delay owing to the generation of new reference data. In a fast fading environment, the channel condition which varies during the delay induces channel estimation error. This paper proposes a method of reducing this estimation error. In this method, channel equalization is performed for the received signal twice. One is done as pre-equalization with the delayed estimates of channel frequency response in order to update them periodically. At the same moment, the other is done as post-equalization for the received signal that is delayed by the processing delay time, with the same estimates as the pre-equalization. By the proposed method, more accurate channel estimation can be realized without significant output delay. Computer simulations are performed by utilizing the IEEE 802.11a packet structure of 24 Mbit/s. The result shows that the proposed OFDM transmission scheme having the delay time of 20 µs offers 2.5 dB improvement in the required Eb/N0 at PER = 10-2 in the ESTI-BRAN model C Rayleigh fading channel with fd = 500 Hz.

Common-mode excitation caused by an imperfect ground plane on a printed circuit board (PCB) has been conventionally explained with the 'current driven' scheme, in which the common-mode current is driven by the ground voltage across the unintentional inductance of the ground plane. We have developed an alternative method for estimating common-mode excitation that is driven by the difference of the common-mode voltages for two connected transmission lines. A parameter called current division factor (CDF) that represents the degree of imbalance of a transmission line explains the common-mode voltage. In this paper, we calculate the CDF with two-dimensional (2-D) static electric field analysis by using the boundary element method (BEM) for asymmetric transmission lines with an arbitrary cross-section. The proposed 2-D method requires less time than three-dimensional simulations. The EMI increase due to a signal line being close to the edge of the ground pattern was evaluated through CDF calculation. The estimated increase agreed well--within 2 dB--with the measured one.

Software rejuvenation is a preventive and proactive solution that is particularly useful for counteracting the phenomenon of software aging. In this paper, we consider both the periodic and non-periodic software rejuvenation policies under different dependability measures. As is well known, the steady-state system availability is the probability that the software system is operating in the steady state and, at the same time, is often regarded as the mean up rate in the system operation period. We show that the mean up rate should be defined as the mean value of up rate, but not as the mean up time per mean operation time. We derive numerically the optimal software rejuvenation policies which maximize the steady-state system availability and the mean up rate, respectively, for each periodic or non-periodic model. Numerical examples show that the real mean up rate is always smaller than the system availability in the steady state and that the availability overestimates the ratio of operative time of the software system.

The paper reviews methods for the measurement and analysis of high precision surfaces. A number of measurement techniques are discussed with the emphasis on the application of con-focal methods. The various techniques are compared in terms of measurement times, data density, and the ability to detect near vertical surfaces, and steps. The two sensing methods discussed are the auto-focus laser method and the white light methods. Particular applications considered are in the measurement of eroded electrical contact surfaces, spherical and near spherical surfaces, and MEMS. The particular emphasis here is on the metrology of such surfaces and devices and methods for the assessment of complex micro-machined surfaces. The paper points to a number of directions for improved metrology and discusses these in the context of the application given.

Active replication is a common approach to building highly available and reliable distributed software applications. The redundant nested invocation (RNI) problem arises when servers in a replicated group issues nested invocations to other server groups in response to a client invocation. Automatic suppression of RNI is always a desirable solution, yet it is usually a difficult design issue. If the system has multithreading support, the difficulties of implementation increase dramatically. Intuitively, to design a deterministic thread execution control mechanism is a possible approach. Unfortunately, some modern operating systems implement thread on kernel level for execution fairness. For the kernel thread case, modification on thread control implies modifying the operating system kernel. This approach loses system portability which is one of the important requirements of CORBA or middleware. In this work, we propose a mechanism to perform the auto-suppression of redundant nested invocation in an active replication fault-tolerant (FT) CORBA system. Besides the mechanism design, we discuss the design correctness semantic and the correctness proof of our design.

Transmission performance of a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) antenna system (i.e., antenna diversity, adaptive antenna array, and space division multiplexing) highly depends on the arrival angle distribution of propagation paths. In this letter, a multipath fading simulator based on distributed scattering model is presented. The impacts of the arrival angle distribution of propagation paths on the bit error rates (BER) performance are measured using an implemented fading simulator and compared with the theoretically predicted performance.

Fading in mobile satellite communications severely degrades the performance of data transmission. It is commonly modeled with non-frequency selective Rayleigh fading. For this type of channel, a new structure for a bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) scheme is presented and evaluated to determine its effectiveness compared to previously proposed schemes. This scheme is referred to as rate-compatible punctured BICM (RCP-BICM), in that its BICM encoder is able to yield a wide range of data rates by using a punctured convolutional code obtained by periodically perforating parity bits from the output of a low-rate-1/2 systematic convolutional code. A trellis-coded modulation (TCM) scheme and a turbo TCM (TTCM) scheme are discussed and evaluated for comparison with the RCP-BICM scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the RCP-BICM scheme with hard-decision iterative decoding is superior to the TCM scheme by 3 dB at a bit error rate (BER) of 10-5 over an Rayleigh fading channel, and comes at a BER of 10-5 within 1 dB of the TCM scheme over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.

Smart or adaptive antennas promise to provide significant space-time communications against fading in wireless communication systems. In this paper, we propose multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming for frequency-selective fading channels to maximize the Signal-to-Noise and Interference Ratio (SINR) based on an iterative update algorithm of transmit and receive weight vectors with prior knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) at both the transmitter and receiver. We derive the necessary conditions for an optimum weight vector solution and propose an iterative weight update algorithm for an optimal SINR reception. The Maximum Signal-to-Noise (MSN) method, where noise includes the additive gaussian noise and interference signals, is used as a criterion. The proposed MIMO with M N arrays allows the cancellation of M + N - 2 delayed channels. Computer simulations are presented to verify our analysis. The results show that significant improvements in performance are possible in wireless communication systems.

In a high-rate indoor wireless personal communication system, the delay spread due to multi-path propagation results in intersymbol interference which can significantly increase the transmission bit error rate (BER). The technique most commonly used for combating the intersymbol interference and frequency-selective fading found in communications channels is the adaptive equalization. In this paper, we propose a novel neural detector based on self-organizing map (SOM) to improve the system performance of the receiver. In the proposed scheme, the SOM is used as an adaptive detector of equalizer, which updates the decision levels to follow the received faded signal. To adapt the proposed scheme to the time-varying channel, we use the Euclidean distance, which will be updated automatically according to the received faded signal, as an adaptive radius to define the neighborhood of the winning neuron of the SOM algorithm. Simulations on a 16 QAM system show that the receiver using the proposed neural detector has a significantly better BER performance than the traditional receiver.

A Generalized Symbol-rate-increased (GSRI) Pragmatic Trellis coded Type-I Hybrid ARQ based on a Selective-Repeat (SR) ARQ with multicopy (MC) retransmission (SR+MC scheme) for high speed mobile satellite communication system is analyzed. The SR+MC ARQ is a suitable scheme for mobile satellite systems and further improvement of the throughput performance can be expected by an additional combination of an error control coding. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the SR+MC scheme employing GSRI Pragmatic TCM. GSRI TC-MPSK can arbitrarily set the bandwidth expansion ratio keeping higher coding gain than conventional TCM scheme. Also Pragmatic TCM has an advantage in that the modulation level can be easily changeable. By changing the modulation level and the bandwidth expansion ratio, this scheme can optimize the performance according to the channel conditions. Numerical and simulation results show that the GSRI Trellis Coded Type-I Hybrid ARQ presents better performance than conventional Pragmatic Trellis Coded Type-I Hybrid ARQ.

Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) systems, which utilize multiple antennas at both the receiver and transmitter, promise very high data rates in a rich scattering environment. It was proven in literature that with optimal power allocation, MIMO eigenmode transmission system (EMTS) is optimal because MIMO capacity is maximized. However, the performance of MIMO EMTS is very sensitive to the accuracy of channel state information and thus it is of practical importance to analyze its performance when channel state information is corrupted under realistic system and propagation conditions. In this paper, we lower bound the mutual information of MIMO EMTS with imperfect channel estimation and delayed quantized feedback in a spatially correlated continuous fading channel. Our results showed that this lower bound is tight and can serve as a comprehensive guide to the actual performance of MIMO EMTS under practical operating conditions.

Diagonal algebraic space time (DAST) block codes was proved to achieve the full transmit diversity over a quasi-static fading channel and to maintain 1 symbol/s/Hz. When the number of transmit antennas employed is larger than 2, DAST codes outperform the codes from orthogonal design with the equivalent spectral efficiency. However, due to the limitation on the signal constellation with complex integer points, no good 3bits/symbol DAST block code was given previously. In this paper, we propose a general form of 8-star-PSK constellations with integer points and present some theoretical results on the performance of the equivalent 8-star-PSK modulations. By using our proposed 8-star-PSKs, we present a searching algorithm to construct DAST codes with 3 bits per symbol under some criteria and investigate their performances over flat Rayleigh fading channels. It is shown that (5,2) 8-star-PSK scheme has a comparable performance to conventional 8PSK over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and the corresponding DSAT codes constructed can achieve significant performance gain over flat Rayleigh fading channel.

Maximizing the throughput of a network while supporting fairness among nodes is one of the most critical issues in designing wireless networks. In single-hop networks, a lot of schemes have been proposed to satisfy this criterion, and efficient protocols like the IEEE 802.11 and the HiperLAN/2 standards have been established for wireless LAN. In multi-hop wireless networks, however, throughput and fairness have different characteristics from those of single-hop networks. In this paper, the tradeoff between throughput and fairness on multi-hop networks is studied by computer simulation, assuming three node distribution models, namely, normal, constant, and uniform distribution and four different bandwidth (channel) scheduling methods, i.e., first-in first-out buffer based, weighted traffic model based, bandwidth reservation based, and maximum throughput based scheduling. Furthermore, as a realistic model, a hybrid scheme is investigated where partial bandwidth is allocated to the bandwidth reservation based scheduling and the remaining to the maximum throughput based one.

Orthogonal multicode direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) has the flexibility in offering various data rate services. However, in a frequency-selective fading channel, the bit error rate (BER) performance is severely degraded since the othogonality among spreading codes is partially lost. In this paper, we apply frequency-domain equalization and antenna diversity combining, used in multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA), to orthogonal multicode DS-CDMA in order to restore the code othogonality while achieving frequency and antenna diversity effect. It is found by computer simulations that the joint use of frequency-domain equalization and antenna diversity combining can significantly improve the BER performance of orthogonal multicode DS-CDMA in a frequency-selective fading channel.

An adaptive filtering algorithm based on the sliding window criterion is known to be very attractive for violent changing environments. In this paper, a new sliding window linearly constrained recursive least squares (SW-LC-RLS) algorithm based on the modified minimum mean squared error (MMSE) structure is devised for the RAKE receiver in direct sequence spread spectrum code-division multiple access (DS-SS CDMA) system over multipath fading channels, where the channel estimation scheme is accomplished at the output of adaptive filter. The proposed SW-LC-RLS algorithm has the advantage of having faster convergence property and tracking ability, and can be applied to the environments, where the narrowband interference is joined suddenly to the system, to achieve desired performance. Via computer simulation, we show that the performance, in terms of mean square errors (MSE), signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and bit error rate (BER), is superior to the conventional LC-RLS and orthogonal decomposition-based LMS algorithms based on the MMSE structure.

Optimistic log-based rollback recovery protocols have been regarded as an attractive fault-tolerant solution in distributed systems based on message-passing paradigm due to low overhead in failure-free time. These protocols are based on a Piecewise Deterministic (PWD) Assumption model. They, however, assumed that all logged non-deterministic events in a consistent global recovery line must be determinately replayed in recovery time. In this paper, we give the impossibility of deterministic replaying of logged non-deterministic event in a consistent global recovery line as a Ω Line Problem, because of asynchronous properties of distributed systems: no bound on the relative speeds of processes, no bound on message transmission delays and no global time source. In addition, we propose a new optimistic log-based rollback recovery protocol, which guarantees the deterministic replaying of all logged non-deterministic events belonged in a consistent global recovery line and solves a Ω Line Problem in recovery time.

We measured the optical propagation characteristics during rainfall over a 72-m propagation distance at the wavelengths of 0.78, 1.55, and 2.0 µm. In addition to the common attenuations, we observed sudden drops (dips) in the received optical power, which affect communication errors. The temporal interval of most dips is approximately 1 ms.

A very general form of the probability density distribution of the fading envelope has been presented by M.Nakagami, including the Nakagami-Rice and Nakagami-Hoyt distributions as special cases. This paper gives the series form expanded in positive terms of the m-distribution for it. Previously, the feasibility of such an expansion was predicted, but there has been no explicit description to date. The properties of the well-known m-distribution and the positive sign in each term of this series make it practical for numerical calculation, approximation and analysis.