Autonomous Information Service System is a proposition made to cope with the continuously changing conditions of service provision and utilization in current information systems. The faded information field (FIF), sustained by push/pull mobile agent technology, is such a distributed architecture that brings high-assurance of the system through a balanced selective replication of the information. When the demand changes, the information environment is restructured so that the same response time to services for all unspecified users can be achieved whatever the demand volume. However, once the structure is fixed, dispatching the randomly incoming requests on the FIF is still required to guarantee the same quality of service. Our goal is to warrant the autonomous dispatching of the pull mobile agents to adjust the continuously evolving arrival distribution of the demand to the current information environment. In this paper, we explain the concepts and realization of autonomous navigation under the goal of an autonomous load balancing of the pull mobile agent volume in the FIF structure. The appropriateness of this method for FIF environments has been shown by simulation.

WFQ (Weighted Fair Queueing) is an ideal scheduling algorithm in terms of delay and fairness. However, timestamp computation complexity makes the implementation difficult. In this paper we propose an efficient and simple fair queueing algorithm, called Emulated Weighted Fair Queueing (EWFQ), which has O(1) complexity for the virtual time computation while it almost perfectly emulates the delay and fairness properties of WFQ. The key idea of EWFQ is that it calibrates the system virtual time only at the end of each packet transmission, while it calculates the system virtual time for a newly arrived packet by employing a linear approximation. By doing so, EWFQ has a rate-proportional property. EWFQ can be implemented in a router for supporting the differential and integrated services.

Surface passivation process of GaN utilizing electron-cyclotron-resonance (ECR) excited plasma has been characterized and optimized for realization of stable operation in GaN-based high-power/high-frequancy electronic devices. From XPS analysis, the NH4OH treatment as well as the ECR-N2 and ECR-H2 plasma treatments were found to be effective in removing natural oxide and contaminants from the GaN surface. The SiNx/GaN structure prepared by the ECR excited plasma chemical vapor deposition (ECR-CVD) process showed better C-V behavior compared to the SiO2/GaN structure. Surface treatment process using the ECR plasma improved interface properties and achieved the Dit value of 21011 cm-2 eV-1 or less. An estimate of the valence band offset by XPS showed that the present SiNx/n-GaN structure has a type-I band lineup, suitable for the surface passivation of GaN-based devices. No pronounced stress remained at the SiNx/GaN interface, which was confirmed by Raman spectroscopy.

We fabricated 50-nm-gate InAlAs/InGaAs high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) lattice-matched to InP substrates by using a conventional process under low temperatures, below 300C, to prevent fluorine contamination and suppress possible diffusion of the Si-δ-doped sheet in the electron-supply layer, and measured the DC and RF performance of the transistors. The DC measurement showed that the maximum transconductance gm of a 50-nm-gate HEMT is about 0.91 S/mm. The cutoff frequency fT of our 50-nm-gate HEMT is 362 GHz, which is much higher than the values reported for previous 50-nm-gate lattice-matched HEMTs. The excellent RF performance of our HEMTs results from a shortening of the lateral extended range of charge control by the drain field, and this may have been achieved because the low-temperature fabrication process suppressed degradation of epitaxial structure.

A power combining technique using a Fabry-Perot resonator with many more active devices is investigated. The Fabry-Perot power combiner consists of two mirrors with a circular groove mounted with the active devices. The power combiner has an axially symmetrical structure and operates at an axially symmetrical TEM01n mode so that uniform device-field coupling required for perfect power combining can be realized. By numerical calculation using the boundary element method, it was shown that high combining efficiency can be obtained when the active devices are mounted in the circular groove of larger radius on either of the two mirrors. In experiments at X-band, power combining efficiency over 90% was obtained for the case of twelve devices on either of the mirrors and the output powers of the twenty or twenty-four devices on both the mirrors were almost perfectly combined.

A periodic approach introduced previously is applied to the TM wave scattering from a finite periodic surface. A mathematical relation is proposed to estimate the scattering amplitude from the diffraction amplitude for the periodic surface, where the periodic surface is defined as a superposition of surface profiles generated by displacing the finite periodic surface by every integer multiple of the period . From numerical examples, it is concluded that the scattering cross section for the finite periodic surface can be well estimated from the diffraction amplitude for a sufficiently large .

A novel InGaAs/InAlAs insulated gate (IG) pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (PHEMT) having a silicon interface control layer (Si ICL) is successfully fabricated and characterized. Systematic efforts to characterize and optimize the insulated gate structure and the PHEMT fabrication process were made by using in-situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) techniques. This led to successful fabrication of a novel IG-PHEMT showing excellent stable DC characteristics with a good pinch off and a high transconductance (177 mS/mm), very small gate leakage currents, very high gate breakdown voltages (about 40 V) and respectable RF characteristics fT = 9 GHz and fmax=38 GHz.

In this paper, the error performances of several reliability based decoding algorithms over the Rayleigh fading channel with coherent detection are evaluated. The algorithms for which the theoretical bounds are evaluated are the Generalized Minimum Distance (GMD), Chase-type, combined GMD and Chase-type and ordered statistic decodings. All derived bounds are relatively tight and require the same computational effort.

Most of the current research is focused on the row-column scanning keyboard interface for English letter and number input. At the present time, there are insufficient methods to control the computer mouse effectively. In this study, a categorized row-column scanning computer interface is developed to improve the conventional single key-in row-column scanning method. The beneficial developments include: speed enhancement by categorizing radicals of keyboard, input control of mouse, and multiple selection of input methods such as surface electromyographic (SEMG) control, breath pressure sensibility control with puff, force sensibility control, infrared sensibility control and single key-in control. Meanwhile, an enhancement software package is developed to increase the row-column scanning keyboard capabilities and to upgrade the completeness of the computer mouse for the disabled persons to control the operation of data entry and the associated implementation better.

We propose hysteresis neural network solving combinatorial optimization problems, Box Puzzling Problem. Hysteresis neural network searches solutions of the problem with nonlinear dynamics. The output vector becomes stable only when it corresponds with a solution. This system does never become stable without satisfying constraints of the problem. After estimating hardware calculating time, we obtain that numerical calculating time increases extremely comparing with hardware time as problem's scale increases. However the system has possibility of limit cycle. Though it is very hard to remove limit cycle completely, we propose some methods to remove this phenomenon.

Several configurations of millimeter wave Gaussian Beam Antennas (GBAs) are studied in this paper. A GBA is a quasi-planar radiating structure comprising a plano-convex half-wavelength Fabry-Perot (FP) resonator excited by a guided source or by a printed source. Both partially transparent mirrors of the resonator are formed with two-dimensional metal meshes. GBAs have very low side lobes, because of the gaussian distribution of the aperture electric field. They can be efficiently used in Wireless Local Area Networks in the 60 GHz band. After a brief presentation of intrinsic properties of FP cavities illuminated by a plane wave under normal incidence, performances of four passive GBAs are described and compared to theoretical results: the first two configurations concern cavities fed either by a waveguide (GBA#1), or by a pyramidal horn antenna (GBA#2); in the last two ones, the cavities are excited by a linearly polarized microstrip patch antenna (GBA#3), or by a coaxial-probe circularly polarized antenna array (GBA#4). These various examples enable to deduce and to compare typical radiation performances of GBAs, depending on (i) the feeding technique (planar or guided), on (ii) the geometry of the FP resonator (radius of curvature, grid parameters) and on (iii) the polarization (linear or circular). In particular, for a planar primary source, it is shown that the directivity and the efficiency of GBAs are respectively in the range [15.5 dB-23.5 dB] and [20%-50%], if power reflectivities of both mirrors are higher than 96.5% and lower than 99.5%, and if the radius of curvature of the cavity varies between 30λ0 and 1600λ0.

This paper presents a fast inversion method for electromagnetic imaging of cylindrical dielectric objects with the optimal regularization parameter used in the Levenberg-Marquardt method. A novel procedure for choosing the optimal regularization parameter is proposed. The method of moments with pulse-basis functions and point matching is applied to discretize the equations for the scattered electric field and the total electric field inside the object. Then the inverse scattering problem is reduced to solving the matrix equation for the unknown expansion coefficients of a contrast function, which is represented as a function of the relative permittivity of the object. The matrix equation may be solved in the least-squares sense with the Levenberg-Marquardt method. Thus the contrast function can be reconstructed by the minimization of a functional, which is expressed as the sum of a standard error term on the scattered electric field and an additional regularization term. While a regularization parameter is usually chosen according to the generalized cross-validation (GCV) method, the optimal one is now determined by minimizing the absolute value of the radius of curvature of the GCV function. This scheme is quite different from the GCV method. Numerical results are presented for a circular cylinder and a stratified circular cylinder consisting of two concentric homogeneous layers. The convergence behaviors of the proposed method and the GCV method are compared with each other. It is confirmed from the numerical results that the proposed method provides successful reconstructions with the property of much faster convergence than the conventional GCV method.

This paper first gives the exact surface integral representation for PO diffracted electromagnetic fields from bounded flat plate through the deformations of the original surface by using field equivalence principle. This exact representation with the surface integral can be approximately reduced to novel line integral along the boundary of the plate by the use of Maggi-Rubinowicz transformation, which keeps a high accuracy even in near zone. Numerical results for the scattering of the electric dipole wave from the square planar plate are presented for demonstrating the accuracy.

A polarization diversity planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) on portable telephone in the practical use near the operator's body is investigated at 1,800 MHz under multipath urban environment. The antenna structure comprises a center-fed square patch with one permanent short-pin and two RF-switches on three corners. The RF-switches perform as the polarization branch switches for dominantly vertical polarization (VP) or dominantly horizontal polarization (HP) modes. The radiation efficiency of the polarization diversity PIFA is 58% and 53% for VP and HP modes, respectively, which is higher than the 52% efficiency of the reference λ/4 monopole antenna under the same condition. The mean effective gain (MEG) of VP and HP modes decrease with respect to the increasing cross-polarization power ratio (XPR). The correlation coefficient of two diversity branches is between 0.66 through all the possible XPR ranging from -10 dB to +10 dB. The diversity gain is computed from the MEG and correlation coefficient to determine the diversity antenna gain (DAG). The diversity gain, based on 10-3 BER for selective combining, is 7.5 dB over non-diversity reception. The DAG is -1.2+2.8 dBi which is approximately 4 dB lower than the case without human body. In other words, the presence of the human body degrades the communication performance by a half.

Solutions based on error-correcting codes for the blacklisting problem of a broadcast distribution system have been proposed by Kumar, Rajagopalan and Sahai. In this paper, detailed analysis of the solutions is presented. By choosing parameters properly in their constructions, we show that the performance is improved significantly.

Packet-based and stream-based traffic will be widely accommodated in third generation mobile systems. In direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems, the impact of packet-based traffic is different from stream-based traffic because of different power control schemes adopted in a multipath fading environment. In this paper, a closed-loop like power control scheme is considered for packet-based traffic on the reverse link. The concept of packet cost is introduced that represents how packet traffic consumes the link capacity of stream-based traffic. The effects of the response delay, the fading maximum Doppler frequency, and the number of resolvable paths on the packet cost for a single cell system are investigated by using Markov modeling for a multipath fading channel with a uniform power delay profile.

This paper considers the design of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transceivers for fixed wireless communications. We propose the use of power control in the QAM transmitter (Tx) to obtain BER performance robust to fading. The gain of the Tx is adaptively adjusted to keep the power of the received signal nearly constant despite of the short term fading and the second multipath. The BER performance of the proposed scheme is analytically evaluated in fixed wireless channels with flat fading and frequency selective fading. Analytic and simulation results show that the use of power control in the Tx can provide the BER performance only about 1 dB inferior to that in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.

An uplink synchronised CDMA system through transmission timing control at mobile users has been proposed to improve the uplink capacity. This Letter mathematically investigates its capacity, considering perfect fast TPC and two antenna diversity reception in a single cell environment and compares it with that of a conventional CDMA system.

This paper describes a method of age-group classification of young males based on their facial images. The facial shapes of males and females are mostly formed by age 20 and 15, respectively. Our study only considered young males as they have a longer period during which facial shape is a determining factor in age estimation. Age classification was carried out using artificial neural networks. We employed 440 facial images in our experiment, composed of 4 different photographic images taken at ages 12, 15, 18 and 22 of 110 young males. Two methods of age classification were used, each employing different features extracted from the facial images, namely, "mosaic features" and "KL features. " As a result, we obtained about an 80% successful classification rate using mosaic features, and a slightly lower rate using KL features. We also analyzed the connection weights between the hidden and input layers of the trained networks, and examined facial features characteristic to each age group.

The available bit rate (ABR) is an ATM service category that provides an economical support of connections having vague requirements. An ABR session may specify its peak cell rate (PCR) and minimum cell rate (MCR), and available bandwidth is allocated to competing sessions based on the max-min policy. In this paper, we investigate the ABR traffic control from a different point of view: Based on the decentralized bandwidth allocation model studied in [9], we prove that the max-min rate vector is the equilibrium of a certain system of noncooperative optimizations. This interpretation suggests a new framework for ABR traffic control that allows the max-min optimality to be achieved and maintained by end-systems, and not by network switches. Moreover, in the discussion, we consider the constrained version of max-min fairness and develop an efficient algorithm with theoretical justification to determine the optimal rate vector.