Real-time database systems have the properties of database and real-time systems. This means they must keep timing constraints of transactions as required in real-time systems, and at the same time ensure database consistency as required in database systems. Real-time concurrency control is a general approach for resolving this conflict. In this type of control, a concurrency control technique for database systems is integrated with a task scheduling technique for real-time systems. This paper surveys previous studies on real-time concurrency control and considers future research directions.

This paper describes a fiber-optic microcell radio system with a spectral delivery switch to meet traffic demands. Optical link performance is discussed from the view points of link loss and noise figure aimed at system design. The theoretical carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) performance is shown as a function of the input electrical power of the laser and the received optical power. Improvement of dynamic range defined by both CNR and intermodulation distortion is proposed by using the frequency modulation (FM) technique. The experimental results using the proposed technique indicate that the performance is much better than that of conventional methods. Moreover, economical diversity planning delivery methods over fibers are presented. This strategy will provide more cost effective and flexible networks.

This paper describes a new supervised speaker adaptation method based on vector field smoothing, for small size adaptation data. This method assumes that the correspondence of feature vectors between speakers can be viewed as a kind of smooth vector field, and interpolation and smoothing of the correspondence are introduced into the adaptation process for higher adaptation performance with small size data. The proposed adaptation method was applied to discrete HMM based speech recognition and evaluated in Japanese phoneme and phrase recognition experiments. Using 10 words as the adaptation data, the proposed method produced almost the same results as the conventional codebook mapping method with 25 words. These experiments clearly comfirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The robust finite settling time stabilization problem is considered for a multivariable discrete time plant with structured uncertainties. Finite settling time (FST) stability of a feedback system is a notion introduced recently for discrete time systems as a generalization of the dead-beat response. The uncertain plant treated in this paper is described by (E0+ΣKi=1qiEi)x(t+1)(A0+ΣKi=1qiAi)x(t)+(B0+ΣKi=1qiBi)u(t), and y(t)=(C0+ΣKi=1qiCi)x(t) where Ei, Ai, Bi and Ci (0iK) are prescribed real matrices and qi (1iK) are uncertain parameters restricted to prescribed intervals [qi, i]. It is shown in this paper that a controller robustly FST stabilizes such an uncertain plant, if, the uncertain plant satisfies some conditions, and the controller simultaneously FST stabilizes a finite set of plants. The result leads to a testable necessary and sufficient condition of the existence of a solution to the robust FST stabilization problem, and a systematic method of designing a robust FST stable feedback system, in the case where the plant contains only one uncertain parameter.

This letter describes the concepts that the learnability of multilayer neural networks exists in a constrained hypersurface in learning space which is formed by input and output subspace of multilayer neural networks, and that a priori information, providing constraints on the learning space, is required for generalization.

Theoretical and experimental evaluations of the horizontal rotating and tilting of the base station antenna beam show that these techniques are effective in reducing delay spread. Result show good agreement between predicted and measured values.

This paper reviews the application of optical technologies to phased array antennas. The performance of the fibre transmission medium and of sources and detectors is reviewed, leading to simple expressions for transmission loss and noise performance. Both coherent and non-coherent beam forming techniques are considered. Future trends, including the use of optical amplifiers and coherent signal generation, will also be discussed.

The performance of a traveling wave Mach-Zehnder external optical modulator (EOM) mixer is described and compared with a conventional diode mixer's performance. Additionally, by incorporating external circuitry, the EOM mixer can provide single sideband suppression in addition to the inherent local oscillator suppression. The basic frequency mixing function of the EOM mixer is first described theoretically and then extended to the sideband suppression case. The performance of both configurations is also presented. Achievable electrical isolation between LO (carrier) and RF (upconverted data signal at LOIF) frequencies is greater than 95 dB and total link conversion loss is 37 dB in this demonstration with a laser diode source. Sideband suppression of greater than 43 dB with respect to the desired sideband at the photodetector output is achieved.

An optimal algorithm for decomposing a special type of the Hasse diagram into a minimum set of disjoint paths is described. It is useful for testing the consistency of functional dependencies.

This paper describes design considerations for high frequency active BPFs up to 100 MHz. The major design issues for high frequency active filters are the excess phase shift in the integrators and high power consumption of the integrators. Typical bipolar transistor based transconductors such as the Gilbert gain cell and the linearized transconductor with two asymmetric emitter-coupled pairs have been analyzed and compared. It has been clarified that the power consumption of the linearized transconductor can be much smaller than that of the Gilbert gain cell because of its high transconductance to working current ratio while maintaining a signal to noise ratio of the same order. A simple high-speed fully differential linearized transconductor cell is proposed with emitter follower buffers and resistive loads for excess phase compensation. A novel gyrator based transformation for the LC ladder BPF has been introduced. This transformation has resulted in a structure with simple capacitor-coupled active resonators which exactly preserves the original transfer function. A fourth order 10.7 MHz BPF IC was designed using the proposed transconductors. It was fabricated and has demonstrated the usefulness of the proposed approach. In addition, an experimental 100 MHz second order BPF IC with Q=14 has been successfully implemented indicating the potential of the proposed approach.

An integrator is quite a suitable active element for high-speed filters. The effect of its excess phase shifts, however, is severe in the case of high-Q filter realization. The deterioration due to the excess phase shifts cannot be avoided when only integrators are used as frequency-dependent elements like in leapfrog realization. This paper describes a design of second-order high-speed and high-Q filters with low sensitivity to excess phase shifts of integrators by adding a passive RC circuit. The proposed method can drastically reduce the effect due to the undesirable pole of an integrator, which is the cause of the excess phase shifts, compared to conventional filters using only integrators. As an example, a fourth-order bandpass filter with 5-MHz center frequency and Q=25 is implemented by the proposed method on a monolithic chip. The results obtained here show quite good agreement with the theoretical values. This demonstrates effectiveness of the proposed method and feasibility of high-speed and high-Q filters on a monolithic chip.

Surface construction is known as a way to visualize volume data. Although currently used algorithms such as marching cubes have good enough quality for volume visualization, they do not ensure adequate surface topology. These algorithms work well when the surface is rather simple. While when complicated, the surface does not separate the internal and external spaces, that is, there exist some holes on the surface, or exist redundant overlaps or self-intersection. Actually, adequate surface topology is important not only for visualization but for laser stereolithography, which creates real 3D plastic objects. In the present paper, we propose a new method that produces a set of triangular patches from a given volume data. The fact that the set of patches has no holes, no redundancy, no self-intersection, and has orientable closed surface topology is shown.

This paper proposes the laser diode receiving mixer which utilizes the laser diode nonlinearity. The laser diode receiving mixer can make the bidirectional fiber optic link simple and cost-effective. These laser diodes are applied to configure the LD-LD MIX link which consists of two laser diodes, two local oscillators, two microwave switches and one fiber cable. The LD-LD MIX link configuration is extended to introduce novel two fiber optic links, i.e. the local suppression link and the image cancellation link. These links utilize the combination of microwave circuits and optical devices. These configurations are experimentally investigated at microwave frequencies and the QPSK signal transmission is successfully demonstrated.

In coherent optical subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) systems, the performance degradation of the system due to the phase noise of lasers restricts the maximum number of stations and channels that the system can serve. However, the effects of phase noise on the performance of the coherent SCM system with distributing Local Oscillator (LO) in local loop have not been analyzed. On the other hand, a limit on both the number of channels and stations can be effectively alleviated by using coding technique. In this paper, the effects of phase noise of lasers on the performance of frequency shift keying (FSK) SCM system with distributing LO in local loop are analyzed in terms of carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) penalty. Second, the effects of Reed-Solomon (RS) coding on FSK SCM system with distributing LO in local loop are analyzed. It is shown that both the number of channels and stations can be increased by using coding technique.

This letter discusses a microstrip line with an open-end termination in which the reflected microwaves can be optically controlled by a laser illumination. The frequency characteristics are emphasized rather than the time domain ones. The reflection characteristics have been demonstrated experimentally and theoretically for the frequency range of 24 GHz. In the theoretical treatment both the conductance and the capacitance are considered in the equivalent circuit model of the open end of the strip.

The erosion of contact metal, which determines the life of contacts in the telephone switching system, is proportional to the arc energy. The equations for arc voltage, arc current, arc duration time and number of arcs are expressed explicitly in terms of circuit parameters and contact properties, and the expression is derived for arc energy that accompanies a single operation of contact closure. Contact erosion is consistent with the calculated arc energy. The erosion rate at closure is estimated based on the measured contact-erosion volume and the calculated arc energy. Arc energy at contact closure becomes as large as that at contact break if the cable is long or the supply voltage is high. This expression in combination with the expression for contact break enabled us to perform contact life design, which is indispensable for maintenance administration of telephone switching systems.

Let C{c1, , cm} be a family of subsets of a finite set S{1, , n}, a subset S of S is a co-hitting set if S contains no element of C as a subset. By using an O((log n)2) time EREW PRAM algorithm for a maximal independent set problem (MIS), we show that a maximal co-hitting set for S can be computed on an EREW PRAN in time O(αβ(log(nm))2) using O(n2 m) processors, where αmax{|cii1, , n} and βmax{|djj1, , n} with dj{ci|jci}. This implies that if αβO((log(nm))k) then the problem is solvable in NC.

An RF IC for a 1.1-V VHF paging receiver is developed. In order to reduce the number of components, it employs direct-conversion frequency shift keying (FSK) architecture. The RF IC adopts two new gain control circuits so as to achieve a wide input dynamic range with only a 1.1 V power supply. One is a low-voltage, low-noise, low-distortion RF amplifier and the other is a low-voltage AGC amplifier. By applying these new circuit technologies, the RF IC achieves a voltage gain of 50.5 dB and a noise figure of 4.3 dB with only 2.0 mW power consumption. Overall, the paging receiver achieves a high sensitivity of -130 dBm and low-intermodulation sensitivity of -37 dBm with bit error rate of 310-2. This paper describes the new high-frequency low-voltage circuit technologies applied in the RF IC.

We propose a new type of Graph Rewriting Systems (GRS) that provide a theoretical foundation for using the reduction method which plays an important role on analyze network reliability. By introducing this GRS, several facts were obtained as follows: (1) We clarified the reduction methods of network reliability analysis in the theoretical framework of GRS. (2) In the framework of GRS, we clarified the significance of the completeness in the reduction methods. (3) A procedure of recognizing complete systems from only given rewriting rules was shown. Specially the procedure (3) is given by introducing a boundary graph (B-Graph). Finally an application of GRS to network reliability analysis is shown.

A multicarrier modulation is considered as an effective technique in high speed digital transmission under the multipath fading. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of the multicarrier modulation/differential detection scheme, and show the trade-offs between the BERs and the number of carriers or the guard period to clarify the optimum values to minimize the BER in the number of carriers and the guard period.