We propose a wideband antenna that has both vertical and horizontal polarization to create access points with enhanced connectivity. The antenna is composed of a rectangular plate and a ground plate, and the rectangular plate is fed sideways from the ground plate. Its -10dB fractional bandwidth is approximately 162%. It is shown that the offset feed of the rectangular plate is important to attain wideband impedance matching and vertical polarized wave. The results of a parametric study to characterize the first- and second-lowest resonant frequencies are presented. Moreover, the behavior of the impedance matching and polarization is interpreted by dividing the current distribution around the feed port on the rectangular plate into the same direction current mode and the opposite direction current mode. The measured results for the return loss and the radiation pattern of a prototype antenna agree well with the simulation results, therefore the wideband property was experimentally confirmed.

In this letter, we analyze performances of a frequency offset estimation based on the maximum likelihood criterion and provide a theoretical proof that the mean squared error of the estimation grows with increase in the offset. Moreover, we propose a new iterative offset estimation method based on the analysis. By computer simulations, we show that the proposed estimator can achieve the lowest estimation error after a few iterations.

Timing and frequency offsets are caused by imperfect synchronization at the receiver. These errors degrade the performance of OFDM systems by introducing inter-carrier-interference (ICI) and inter-symbol-interference (ISI). In this paper, we derive signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) analytically with timing and frequency offsets for the case that the sampling rate of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in OFDM receiver is an integer fraction of the signal bandwidth. We find the exact form of interference power as a function of the fractional sampling rate. Our derived analysis is confirmed by simulations and can be applied to see the exact performance of OFDM systems with fractional sampling rate.

In this letter, a simple and robust synchronization algorithm for second generation terrestrial digital video broadcasting (DVB-T2) receivers is proposed. In the proposed detection scheme, the coarse symbol timing is estimated by decimating a correlation output to give a sharper peak timing detection metric. Such a design can improve the timing synchronization accuracy as well as enhance its robustness to frequency selective channels.

In this letter, we propose an improved timing offset estimation scheme without making use of pilot symbols in the HomePlug Green PHY (HomePlug GP) standard. In contrast to the conventional decision-directed timing estimation scheme, the proposed scheme exploits the inherent repetition information of the HomePlug GP signals, thus not only removing the need for the estimated data or pilot symbols but also improving the timing estimation performance.

In this paper, we present the channel estimation (CE) problem in the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (OFDM/OQAM). Most CE methods rely on the assumption of a low frequency selective channel to tackle the problem in a way similar to OFDM. However, these methods would result in a severe performance degradation of the channel estimation when the assumption is not quite inaccurate. Instead, we focus on estimating the channel impulse response (CIR) itself which makes no assumption on the degree of frequency selectivity of the channels. After describing the main idea of this technique, we present an iterative CE method that does not require zero-value guard symbols in the preamble and consequently improves the spectral efficiency. This is done by the iterative estimation of the unknown transmitted data adjacent to the preamble. Analysis and simulation results validate the efficacy of the proposed method in multipath fading channels.

In this letter, standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) with the center-symmetric trimmed correlation matrix and the orthogonal projection technique is firstly presented for blind carrier frequency offset estimation under interleaved orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink systems. It doesn't require eigenvalue decomposition and only needs a single OFDMA data block. Second, this letter also presents adaptive multiple inertia weights with Newton method to speed up the convergence of standard PSO iteration process. Meanwhile, the advantage of inherent interleaved OFDMA signal structure also is exploited to conquer the problems of local optimization and the effect of ambiguous peaks for the proposed approaches. Finally, several simulation results are provided for illustration and comparison.

A network-based remote host clock skew measurement involves collecting the offsets, the differences between sending and receiving times, of packets from the host within a period of time. Although the variant and immeasurable delay in each packet prevents the measurer from getting the real clock offset, the local minimum delays and the majority of delays delineate the clock offset shifts, and are used by existing approaches to estimate the skew. However, events during skew measurement like time synchronization and rerouting caused by switching network interface or base transceiver station may break the trend into multi-segment patterns. Although the skew in each segment is theoretically of the same value, the skew derived from the whole offset-set usually differs with an error of unpredictable scale. In this work, a method called dynamic region of offset majority locating (DROML) is developed to detect multi-segment cases, and to precisely estimate the skew. DROML is designed to work in real-time, and it uses a modified version of the HT-based method [8] both to measure the skew of one segment and to detect the break between adjacent segments. In the evaluation section, the modified HT-based method is compared with the original method and with a linear programming algorithm (LPA) on accumulated-time and short-term measurement. The fluctuation of the modified method in the short-term experiment is 0.6 ppm (parts per million), which is obviously less than the 1.23 ppm and 1.45 ppm from the other two methods. DROML, when estimating a four-segment case, is able to output a skew of only 0.22 ppm error, compared with the result of the normal case.

The High efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard defines two in-loop filters to improve the objective and subjective quality of the reconstructed frames. Through analyzing the effectiveness of the in-loop filters, it is noted that band offset (BO) process achieves much more coding gains for text region which mostly employ intra block copy (IntraBC) prediction mode. The intraBC prediction process in HEVC is performed by using the already reconstructed region for block matching, which is similar to motion compensation. If BO process is applied after one coding tree unit (CTU) encoded, the distortion between original and reconstructed samples copied by the IntraBC prediction will be further reduced, which is simple to operate and can obtain good coding efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves up to 3.4% BD-rate reduction in All-intra (AI) for screen content sequences with encoding and decoding time no increase.

This paper describes a blind frequency offset estimator (FOE) with wide frequency range for coherent quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) receivers. The FOE combines a spectrum-based frequency offset estimation algorithm as a coarse estimator with a frequency offset estimation algorithm using the periodogram as a fine estimator. To establish our design methodology, each block of the FOE is rigorously analyzed by using formulas and the minimum fast Fourier transform (FFT) size that generates a frequency spectrum for both the coarse and fine estimators is determined. The coarse estimator's main feature is that all estimation processes are carried out in the frequency domain, which yields convergence more than five times faster than that of conventional estimators. The estimation frequency range of the entire FOE is more than 1.8 times wider than that of conventional FOEs. Experiments on coherent optical 64-ary QAM (64-QAM) reveal that frequency offset estimation can be achieved under a frequency offset value greater than the highest value of the conventional estimation range.

We propose a low-noise and low-power dynamic comparator with an offset calibration circuit for Low-Power ADCs. The proposed comparator equips the control circuit in order to switching the comparison accuracy and the current consumption. When high accuracy is not required, current consumption is reduced by allowing the noise increase. Compared with a traditional dynamic comparator, the proposed architecture reduced the current consumption to 78% at 100MHz operating and 1.8V supply voltage. Furthermore, the offset voltage is corrected with minimal current consumption by controlling the on/off operation of the offset calibration circuit.

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is a video compression standard that outperforms the predecessor H.264/AVC by doubling the compression efficiency. To enhance the coding accuracy, HEVC adopts sample adaptive offset (SAO), which reduces the distortion of reconstructed pixels using classification based non-linear filtering. In the traditional coding tree unit (CTU) grain based VLSI encoder implementation, during the pixel classification stage, SAO cannot use the raw samples in the boundary of the current CTU because these pixels have not been processed by deblocking filter (DF). This paper proposes a hardware-oriented category determination algorithm based on estimating the deblocking strengths on CTU boundaries and selectively adopting the promising samples in these areas during SAO classification. Compared with HEVC test mode (HM11.0), experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves an average 0.13%, 0.14%, and 0.12% BD-bitrate reduction (equivalent to 0.0055dB, 0.0058dB, and 0.0097dB increases in PSNR) in CTU sizes of 64 × 64, 32 × 32, and 16 × 16, respectively.

In this paper, an interference rejection combining (IRC) technique is proposed for SFBC-OFDM cellular systems that exhibit multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs). The IRC weight and the corresponding value for CFO compensation in the proposed technique are obtained by maximizing the post-SINR, i.e., minimizing both the interference signal and inter-channel interference (ICI) terms caused by multiple CFOs. The performance of the conventional IRC and proposed IRC techniques is evaluated by computer simulation for an SFBC-OFDM cellular system with multiple CFOs.

A low-complexity time-frequency multiplex estimator and low-complexity equalizer transceiver design are proposed to combat the problems of RF impairment associated with zero-IF transceiver of multi-carrier systems. Moreover, the proposed preambles can estimate the transmitter (TX) in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalance, carrier frequency offset (CFO), and channel impulse response parameters. The proposed system has two parts. First, all parameters of the impairments are estimated by the designed time-frequency multiplex estimator. Second, the estimated parameters are used to compensate the above problems and detect the transmitted signal with low complexity. Simulation results confirm that the proposed estimator performs reliably with respect to IQ imbalance, CFO, and multipath fading channel effects.

By investigating the properties that the offsets should satisfy, this letter presents a brief proof of general QAM Golay complementary sequences (GCSs) in Cases I-III constructions. Our aim is to provide a brief, clear, and intelligible derivation so that it is easy for the reader to understand the known Cases I-III constructions of general QAM GCSs.

This letter deals with the carrier frequency offsets (CFO) estimation problem for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink systems. Combined with centro-symmetric (CS) trimmed autocorrelation matrix and weighting subspace projection, the proposed estimator has better estimate performance than MVDR, MUSIC, CS-MUSIC, and ESPRIT estimators, especially in relatively less of OFDMA blocks and low SNR situations. Simulation results are presented to verify the efficiency of the proposed estimator.

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the new generation video compression standard. Sample adaptive offset (SAO) is a new compression tool adopted in HEVC which reduces the distortion between original samples and reconstructed samples. SAO estimation is the process of determining SAO parameters in video encoding. It is divided into two phases: statistic collection and parameters determination. There are two difficulties for VLSI implementation of SAO estimation. The first is that there are huge amount of samples to deal with in statistic collection phase. The other is that the complexity of Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) in parameters determination phase is very high. In this article, a fast SAO estimation algorithm and its corresponding VLSI architecture are proposed. For the first difficulty, we use bitmaps to collect statistics of all the 16 samples in one 4×4 block simultaneously. For the second difficulty, we simplify a series of complicated procedures in HM to balance the algorithms complexity and BD-rate performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm maintains the picture quality improvement. The VLSI design based on this algorithm can be implemented using 156.32K gates, 8,832bits single port RAM for 8bits depth case. It can be synthesized to 400MHz @ 65nm technology and is capable of 8K×4K @ 120fps encoding.

In this letter, we propose a simple algorithm to jointly estimate the symbol timing offset (STO) and carrier frequency offset (CFO) of wireless body area network (WBAN) signals. The preamble specified in IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN is used to achieve an accurate timing and frequency estimation based on the differential correlation. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed joint estimation scheme can be effectively employed to get accurate STO and CFO estimate with less complexity.

We propose a temperature sensor employing a ring oscillator composed of poly-Si thin-film transistors (TFTs). Particularly in this research, we compare temperature sensors using TFTs with lightly-doped drain structure (LDD TFTs) and TFTs with offset drain structure (offset TFTs). First, temperature dependences of transistor characteristics are compared between the LDD and offset TFTs. It is confirmed that the offset TFTs have larger temperature dependence of the on current. Next, temperature dependences of oscillation frequencies are compared between ring oscillators using the LDD and offset TFTs. It is clarified that the ring oscillator using the offset TFTs is suitable to detect the temperature. We think that this kind of temperature sensor is available as a digital device.

We have proposed an intruder detection method by using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. Although the channel capacity for MIMO transmission is severely degraded in time-variant channels, we can take advantage of this feature in MIMO sensor applications. For MIMO sensors, the accurate estimation of channel state information (CSI) is essential. Moreover, the transceiver should be simplified from the viewpoint of saving power. Narrowband signals such as minimum shift keying (MSK) and offset quaternary phase shift keying signals are effective and are used in sensor network systems. However, because the timing and carrier offsets between the transmitter and receiver are relatively large compared to the symbol rate, accurate CSI estimation is impossible given the severe constraints imposed by the timing and carrier offsets. To solve this issue, a signal synchronization method for the CSI estimation using a narrowband MSK signal has been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new CSI estimation method for arbitrary amplitude and phase modulation schemes for the MIMO sensor. The key point of the proposed method is that control signals (unique words) are mapped so as not to pass through the origin of the complex I/Q plane. The estimation accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated via a computer simulation. Moreover, the basic performance by the proposed CSI estimation method is verified when considering intruder detection by MIMO sensor.