A novel scheme to implement a filter bank multicarrier/offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC/OQAM) transmission system is proposed. This is achieved by replacing the existing polyphase filter banks based on FFT/IFFT with fast filter bank (FFB) in order to utilize its good properties such as cascaded structure and high frequency selectivity with a comparable complexity as FFT/IFFT. Although this topic is not addressed in the literature, the impulse response of the prototype filter for each stage within FFB can still be obtained by using an optimization technique, which is used to minimize the distortion caused by intersymbol and interchannel interferences (ISI and ICI) of the proposed FBMC/OQAM transmission system, subject to allowable ripples in the passband and stopband. As a result, the relationship between two-path prototype filters in each subfilter should be modified with a general form accordingly. Simulations show that the number of multiplications required by the proposed scheme is smaller than that needed by the polyphase filter banks solution based on FFT/IFFT. Furthermore, the suitability of the design of prototype filters and the validation can be also supported by the results.

A striped inductor and its utilization of a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) are studied with the aim of suppressing phase noise degradation in K- and Ka-bands. The proposed striped inductor exhibits reduced series resistance in the high frequency region by increasing the cross-sectional peripheral length, as with the Litz wire, and the VCO of the striped inductor simultaneously exhibits a lower phase noise than that of the conventional inductor. Striped and conventional inductors and VCOs are designed and fabricated, and their use of K- and Ka-bands is measured. Results show that the Q factor and corner frequency of the striped inductor are approximately 1.3 and 1.6 times higher, respectively, than that of the conventional inductor. Moreover, the 1-MHz-offset phase noise of the striped inductor's VCO in the K- and Ka-bands was approximately 3.5 dB lower than that of the conventional inductor. In this study, a 65-nm standard CMOS process was used.

An r-gathering of customers C to facilities F is an assignment A of C to open facilities F' ⊂ F such that r (≥ 2) or more customers are assigned to each open facility. (Each facility needs enough number of customers for its opening.) Then the r-gathering problem finds an r-gathering minimizing a designated cost. Armon gave a simple 3-approximation algorithm for the r-gathering problem and proved that with assumption P ≠ NP the problem cannot be approximated within a factor of less than 3 for any r ≥ 3. The running time of the 3-approximation algorithm is O(|C||F|+r|C|+|C|log|C|)). In this paper we improve the running time of the algorithm by (1) removing the sort in the algorithm and (2) designing a simple but efficient data structure.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) translates the brain activity into commands to control external devices. P300 speller based character recognition is an important kind of application system in BCI. In this paper, we propose a framework to integrate channel correlation analysis into P300 detection. This work is distinguished by two key contributions. First, a coefficient matrix is introduced and constructed for multiple channels with the elements indicating channel correlations. Agglomerative clustering is applied to group correlated channels. Second, the statistics of central tendency are used to fuse the information of correlated channels and generate virtual channels. The generated virtual channels can extend the EEG signals and lift up the signal-to-noise ratio. The correlated features from virtual channels are combined with original signals for classification and the outputs of discriminative classifier are used to determine the characters for spelling. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the channel correlation analysis based framework. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the recognition rate was increased by both 6% with 5 and 10 epochs by the proposed framework.

The purpose of this study is to make available a fall risk assessment for stroke patients during walking using an accelerometer. We assessed gait parameters, normalized root mean squared acceleration (NRMSA) and berg balance scale (BBS) values. Walking dynamics were better reflected in terms of the risk of falls during walking by NRMSA compared to the BBS.

There is a strong demand to enjoy broadband and stable Internet connectivity not only in office and the home but also in high-speed train. Several systems are providing high-speed train with Internet connectivity using various technologies such as leaky coaxial cable (LCX), Wi-Fi, and WiMAX. However, their actual throughputs are less than 2Mbps. We developed a free-space optical (FSO) communication transceiver called LaserTrainComm2014 that achieves the throughput of 1 Gbps between the ground and a train. LaserTrainComm2014 employs a high-speed image sensor for coarse tracking and a quadrant photo-diode (QPD) for accurate tracking. Since the image captured by the high-speed image sensor has several types of noise, image processing is necessary to detect the beacon light of the other LaserTrainComm2014. As a result of field experiments in a vehicle test course, LaserTrainComm2014 achieves handover time of 21 milliseconds (ms) in the link layer at the speed of 60km/h. Even if the network layer signaling takes time of 10 milliseconds, the total communication disruption time due to handover is short enough to provide passengers with Internet connectivity for live streaming Internet applications such as YouTube, Internet Radio, and Skype.

Single-carrier (SC) transmission with space-time block coded (STBC) transmit diversity can achieve good bit error rate (BER) performance. However, in a high mobility environment, the STBC codeword orthogonality is distorted and as consequence, the BER performance is degraded by the interference caused by the orthogonality distortion of STBC codeword. In this paper, we proposed a novel frequency-domain equalization (FDE) for SC-STBC transmit diversity in doubly selective fading channel. Multiple FDE weight matrices, each associated with a different code block, are jointly optimized based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion taking into account not only channel frequency variation but also channel time variation over the STBC codeword. Computer simulations confirm that the proposed robust FDE achieves BER performance superior to conventional FDE, which was designed based on the assumption of a quasi-static fading.

In this study, we investigated Si(100), Si(110) and Si(111) surface flattening process utilizing sacrificial oxidation method, and its effect on Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor (MIS) diode characteristics. By the etching of the 100 nm-thick sacrificial oxide formed by thermal oxidation at 1100°C, the surface roughness of Si(100), Si(110) and Si(111) substrates were reduced. The obtained Root-Mean-Square (RMS) roughness of Si(100) was reduced from 0.22 nm (as-cleaned) to 0.07 nm (after etching), while it was reduced from 0.23 nm to 0.12 nm in the case of Si(110), and from 0.23 nm to 0.11 nm in the case of Si(111), respectively. Furthermore, it was found that time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) characteristics of MIS diodes for p-Si(100), p-Si(110) and p-Si(111) were improved with the reduction of Si surface RMS roughness.

This study proposes the application and implementation of a new power factor correction (PFC) with a variable slope ramp for a small wind power system without any input voltage sensing circuits or external control components in the current shaping loop. The hardware description of the variable slope ramp simplifies the complexity of integrated circuit realization with low resolution analog-to-digital converters, and achieves a high power factor for multi and three-phase AC/DC converters such as wind power systems. Up to 1 kW small wind power system is tested to verify the performance of the proposed PFC control. The highest achieved power factor reaches 99.5%.

Given a set of positive-weighted points and a query rectangle r (specified by a client) of given extents, the goal of a maximizing range sum (MaxRS) query is to find the optimal location of r such that the total weights of all points covered by r is maximized. In this paper, we address the problem of processing MaxRS queries over road network databases and propose two new external memory methods. Through a set of simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed methods.

Although SDN provides desirable characteristics such as the manageability, flexibility and extensibility of the networks, it has a considerable disadvantage in its reliability due to its centralized architecture. To protect SDN-enabled networks under large-scale, unexpected link failures, we propose ResilientFlow that deploys distributed modules called Control Channel Maintenance Module (CCMM) for every switch and controllers. The CCMMs makes switches able to maintain their own control channels, which are core and fundamental part of SDN. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate the ResilientFlow.

Electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) measure the brain signal from spatially-distributed electrodes. In order to detect event-related synchronization and desynchronization (ERS/ERD), which are utilized for brain-computer/machine interfaces (BCI/BMI), spatial filtering techniques are often used. Common spatial potential (CSP) filtering and its extensions which are the spatial filtering methods have been widely used for BCIs. CSP transforms brain signals that have a spatial and temporal index into vectors via a covariance representation. However, the variance-covariance structure is essentially different from the vector space, and not all the information can be transformed into an element of the vector structure. Grassmannian embedding methods, therefore, have been proposed to utilize the variance-covariance structure of variational patterns. In this paper, we propose a metric learning method to classify the brain signal utilizing the covariance structure. We embed the brain signal in the extended Grassmann manifold, and classify it on the manifold using the proposed metric. Due to this embedding, the pattern structure is fully utilized for the classification. We conducted an experiment using an open benchmark dataset and found that the proposed method exhibited a better performance than CSP and its extensions.

Recently, the Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) have been recognized as the key to the integration and interoperability of different applications and systems that coexist in an organization. However, even though the use of SOA has increased, some applications are unable to use it. That is the case of mission critical information applications, whose requirements such as high reliability, non-stop operation, high flexibility and high performance are not satisfied by conventional SOA infrastructures. In this article we present a novel approach of combining SOA with Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ADS) in order to provide an infrastructure that can satisfy those requirements. We have named this infrastructure Autonomous Decentralized Service Oriented Architecture (ADSOA). We present the concept and architecture of ADSOA, as well as the Loosely Couple Delivery Transaction and Synchronization Technology for assuring the data consistency and high reliability of the application. Moreover, a real implementation and evaluation of the proposal in a mission critical information system, the Uniqueness Verifying Public Key Infrastructure (UV-PKI), is shown in order to prove its effectiveness.

Nonnegative component representation (NCR) is a mid-level representation based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). Recently, it has attached much attention and achieved encouraging result for action recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical dictionary learning strategy (HDLS) for NMF to improve the performance of NCR. Considering the variability of action classes, HDLS clusters the similar classes into groups and forms a two-layer hierarchical class model. The groups in the first layer are disjoint, while in the second layer, the classes in each group are correlated. HDLS takes account of the differences between two layers and proposes to use different dictionary learning methods for this two layers, including the discriminant class-specific NMF for the first layer and the discriminant joint dictionary NMF for the second layer. The proposed approach is extensively tested on three public datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of NCR with HDLS for large-scale action recognition.

Cloud storage has become popular and is being used to hold important data. As a result, availability to become important; cloud storage providers should allow users to upload or download data even if some part of the system has failed. In this paper, we discuss distributed cloud storage that is robust against failures. In distributed cloud storage, multiple replicas of each data chunk are stored in the virtual storage at geographically different locations. Thus, even if one of the virtual storage systems becomes unavailable, users can access the data chunk from another virtual storage system. In distributed cloud storage, the placement of the virtual storage system is important; if the placement of the virtual cloud storage system means that a large number of virtual storages are possible could become unavailable from a failure, a large number of replicas of each data chunk should be prepared to maintain availability. In this paper, we propose a virtual storage placement method that assures availability with a small number of replicas. We evaluated our method by comparing it with three other methods. The evaluation shows that our method can maintain availability while requiring only with 60% of the network costs required by the compared methods.

Online used markets such as eBay, Yahoo Auction, and Craigslist have been popular due to the web services. Compared to the shopping mall websites like eBay or Yahoo Auction, web community-style used markets often expose the private information of sellers. In Korea, the most popular online used market is a website called “Joonggonara” with more than 13 million users, and it uses an informal posting format that does not protect the users' privacy identifiable information. In this work, we examine the privacy leakage from the online used markets in Korea, and show that 45.9% and 74.0% of sample data expose cellular phone numbers and email addresses, respectively. In addition, we demonstrate that the private information can be maliciously exploited to identify a subscriber of the social network service.

The routing efficiency of structured overlay networks depends on the consistency of pointers between nodes, where a pointer maps a node identifier to the corresponding address. This consistency can, however, break temporarily when some overlay nodes fail, since it takes time to repair the broken pointers in a distributed manner. Conventional solutions utilize “backpointers” to quickly discover any failure among the pointing nodes, which allow them to fix the pointers in a short time. Overlay nodes are, however, required to maintain backpointers for every pointing node, which incurs significant memory and consistency check overhead. This paper proposes a novel light-weight protocol; an overlay node gives a “living will” containing its acquaintances (backpointers) only to its successor, thus other nodes are freed from the need to maintain it. Our carefully-designed protocol guarantees that all acquaintances are registered via the living will, even in the presence of churn, and the successor notifies the acquaintances for the deceased. Even if the successor passes away and the living will is lost, the successor to the successor can identify the acquaintances with a high success ratio. Simulations show that our protocol greatly reduces memory overhead as well as the detection time for node failure with the cost being a slight increase in messaging load.

An on-chip monitoring circuit using a sub-sampling scheme, which consists of a 6-bit flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a 51-phase phase-locked loop (PLL)-based frequency synthesizer, is proposed to analyze the signal integrity of a single-ended 8-Gb/s octal data rate (ODR) chip-to-chip interface with a source synchronous clocking scheme.

In the obnoxious facility game with a set of agents in a space, we wish to design a mechanism, a decision-making procedure that determines a location of an undesirable facility based on locations reported by the agents, where we do not know whether the location reported by an agent is where exactly the agent exists in the space. For a location of the facility, the benefit of each agent is defined to be the distance from the location of the facility to where the agent exists. Given a mechanism, all agents are informed of how the mechanism utilizes locations reported by the agents to determine a location of the facility before they report their locations. Some agent may try to manipulate the decision of the facility location by strategically misreporting her location. As a fair decision-making, mechanisms should be designed so that no particular group of agents can get a larger benefit by misreporting their locations. A mechanism is called group strategy-proof if no subset of agents can form a group such that every member of the group can increase her benefit by misreporting her location jointly with the rest of the group. For a given mechanism, a point in the space is called a candidate if it can be output as the location of the facility by the mechanism for some set of locations reported by agents. In this paper, we consider the case where a given space is a tree metric, and characterize the group strategy-proof mechanisms in terms of distribution of all candidates in the tree metric. We prove that there exists a group strategy-proof mechanism in the tree metric if and only if the tree has a point to which every candidate has the same distance.

The optical properties of arrays of nanoholes and nanoslits in Al films were investigated both numerically and experimentally. The choice of Al was based on its low cost and ease of processing, in addition to the fact that it has a higher plasma frequency than gold or silver, leading to lower optical losses at wavelengths of 400 to 500nm.