We proposed a new method for evaluating the deterioration of messenger wires by using terahertz waves. We use terahertz time-domain spectroscopy to measure several twisted wire samples with different levels of deterioration. We find that each twisted wire sample had a different distribution of reflection intensity which was due to the wires' twist structure. We show that it is possible to assess the degradation from the straight lines present in the reflection intensity distribution image. Furthermore, it was confirmed that our method can be applied to wire covered with resin.

When BJTs are irradiated by gamma rays, interface trapped charges and positive oxide trapped charges are formed by ionization at the Si-SiO2 interface and SiO2 regions, respectively. These trapped charges affect the movement of carriers depending on the type of BJT. This paper presents experimental results regarding operating characteristics of gamma irradiated pnp Si BJTs.

In 2015, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation started to provide information on aircraft flying over Japan, called CARATS Open Data, and to promote research on aviation systems actively. The airspace is divided into sectors, which are used for limiting air traffic to control safely and efficiently. Since the demand for air transportation is increasing, new optimization techniques and efficient control have been required to predict and resolve demand-capacity imbalances in the airspace. In this paper, we aim to construct mathematical models of the inter-sector air traffic flow from CARATS Open Data. In addition, we develop methods to predict future sector demand. Accuracy of the prediction is evaluated by comparison between predicted sector demand and the actual data.

Couplers in a film-type capacitive wireless power charging (CWC) system for an implantable medical device were designed and analyzed in this work. Due to the high conductivity of the human body, two paths contribute to the power transmission, namely a high-frequency current and an electric field. This was confirmed by an equivalent circuit of the system. During analysis of the system, we used pig skin with subcutaneous fat, which has a high affinity with the human body, to search for a highly efficient electrode shape. Subsequently, we fabricated the designed coupler and measured ηmax. An ηmax of 56.6% was obtained for a half-circular coupler with a radius of 20 mm and a distance of 10 mm between adjacent couplers. This study will contribute to the realization of implantable devices that can be recharged during breaks or while sleeping at home and is expected to significantly reduce the burden on patients.

Real-time applications are becoming more and more popular, and due to the demand for more compact and portable user devices, offloading terminal processes to edge servers is being considered. Moreover, it is necessary to process packets with low latency on edge servers, which are often virtualized for operability. When trying to achieve low-latency networking, the increase in server power consumption due to performance tuning and busy polling for fast packet receiving becomes a problem. Thus, we design and implement a low-latency and energy-efficient networking system, energy-efficient kernel busy poll (EE-KBP), which meets four requirements: (A) low latency in the order of microseconds for packet forwarding in a virtual server, (B) lower power consumption than existing solutions, (C) no need for application modification, and (D) no need for software redevelopment with each kernel security update. EE-KBP sets a polling thread in a Linux kernel that receives packets with low latency in polling mode while packets are arriving, and when no packets are arriving, it sleeps and lowers the CPU operating frequency. Evaluations indicate that EE-KBP achieves microsecond-order low-latency networking under most traffic conditions, and 1.4× to 3.1× higher throughput with lower power consumption than NAPI used in a Linux kernel.

The road space rationing (RSR) method regulates a period in which a user group can make telephone calls in order to decrease the call attempt rate and induce calling parties to shorten their calls during disaster congestion. This paper investigates what settings of this indirect control induce more self-restraint and how the settings change calling parties' behavior using experimental psychology. Our experiments revealed that the length of the regulated period differently affected calling parties' behavior (call duration and call attempt rate) and indicated that the 60-min RSR method (i.e., 10 six-min periods) is the most effective setting against disaster congestion.

In this paper, we report an experimental and numerical analysis of ultrahigh-speed coherent Nyquist pulse transmission. First, we describe a low-nonlinearity dispersion compensator for ultrahigh-speed coherent Nyquist pulse transmission; it is composed of a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) and a liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) device. By adopting CFBG instead of inverse dispersion fiber, the nonlinearity in a 160km transmission line was more than halved. Furthermore, by eliminating the group delay fluctuation of the CFBG with an LCoS device, the residual group delay was reduced to as low as 1.42ps over an 11nm bandwidth. Then, by using the transmission line with the newly constructed low-nonlinearity dispersion compensator, we succeeded in improving the BER performance of single-channel 15.3Tbit/s-160km transmission by one-third compared with that of a conventional dispersion-managed transmission line and obtained a spectral efficiency of 8.7bit/s/Hz. Furthermore, we numerically analyzed the BER performance of its Nyquist pulse transmission. The numerical results showed that the nonlinear impairment in the transmission line is the main factor limiting the transmission performance in a coherent Nyquist pulse transmission, which becomes more significant at higher baud rates.

Selecting visually overlapping image pairs without any prior information is an essential task of large-scale structure from motion (SfM) pipelines. To address this problem, many state-of-the-art image retrieval systems adopt the idea of bag of visual words (BoVW) for computing image-pair similarity. In this paper, we present a method for improving the image pair selection using BoVW. Our method combines a conventional vector-based approach and a set-based approach. For the set similarity, we introduce a modified version of the Simpson (m-Simpson) coefficient. We show the advantage of this measure over three typical set similarity measures and demonstrate that the combination of vector similarity and the m-Simpson coefficient effectively reduces false positives and increases accuracy. To discuss the choice of vocabulary construction, we prepared both a sampled vocabulary on an evaluation dataset and a basic pre-trained vocabulary on a training dataset. In addition, we tested our method on vocabularies of different sizes. Our experimental results show that the proposed method dramatically improves precision scores especially on the sampled vocabulary and performs better than the state-of-the-art methods that use pre-trained vocabularies. We further introduce a method to determine the k value of top-k relevant searches for each image and show that it obtains higher precision at the same recall.

We consider network security exercises where students construct virtual networks with User-mode Linux (UML) virtual machines and then execute attack and defense activities on these networks. In an older version of the exercise system, the students accessed the desktop screens of the remote servers running UMLs with Windows applications and then built networks by executing UML commands. However, performing the exercises remotely (e.g., due to the COVID-19 pandemic) resulted in difficulties due to factors such as the dependency of the work environment on specific operating systems, narrow-band networks, as well as issues in providing support for configuring UMLs. In this paper, a novel web-based hands-on system with intuitive and seamless operability and lightweight responsiveness is proposed in order to allow performing the considered exercises while avoiding the mentioned shortcomings. The system provides web pages for editing device layouts and cable connections by mouse operations intuitively, web pages connecting to UML terminals, and web pages for operating X clients running on UMLs. We carried out experiments for evaluating the proposed system on the usability, system performance, and quality of experience. The subjects offered positive assessments on the operability and no negative assessments on the responsiveness. As for command inputs in terminals, the response time was shorter and the traffic was much smaller in comparison with the older system. Furthermore, the exercises using nano required at least 16 kbps bandwidth and ones using wireshark required at least 2048 kbps bandwidth.

Graph layouts reveal global or local structures of graph data. However, there are few studies on assisting readers in better reconstructing a graph from a layout. This paper attempts to generate a layout whose edges can be reestablished. We reformulate the graph layout problem as an edge classification problem. The inputs are the vertex pairs, and the outputs are the edge existences. The trainable parameters are the laid-out coordinates of the vertices. We propose a binary classification-based graph layout (BCGL) framework in this paper. This layout aims to preserve the local structure of the graph and does not require the total similarity relationships of the vertices. We implement two concrete algorithms under the BCGL framework, evaluate our approach on a wide variety of datasets, and draw comparisons with several other methods. The evaluations verify the ability of the BCGL in local neighborhood preservation and its visual quality with some classic metrics.

Almost-complementary pairs (ACPs) are sequence pairs whose autocorrelations sum up to zero at all but one non-zero time-shifts. Periodic ACPs (P-ACPs) display almost similar correlation properties to that of the periodic complementary pairs (PCPs). In this letter, we propose systematic constructions of quadriphase P-ACPs (QP-ACPs) from aperiodic (periodic) complementary pairs and almost perfect binary (quadriphase) sequences. The proposed construction gives QP-ACPs of new lengths which are not covered in the literature.

Currently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been widely used in many applications, such as in transportation logistics, public safety, or even in non-terrestrial networks (NTN). In all these scenarios, it is an important issue to model channel behavior between the UAV and the user equipment (UE) on the ground. Among these channel features, a critical parameter that dominates channel behavior is the probability of the line-of-sight (LOS), since the statistical property of the channel fading can be either Ricean or Rayleigh, depending on the existence of LOS. Besides, with knowledge of LOS probability, operators can design approaches or schemes to maximum system performance, such as the serving coverage, received signal to noise ratio (SNR), or the bit error rate (BER) with the limited transmitted power. However, the LOS UAV channel is likely difficult to acquire or derive, as it depends on the deployment scenario, such as an urban or rural area. In this paper, we generated four different scenarios defined by the ITU via the ray tracing simulator. Then, we used the spatial geometric relation and the curve fitting approach to derive the analytic models to predict the probability of the UAV LOS channels for different scenarios. Results show that our proposed relationships yield better prediction results than the methods in the literature. Besides, an example of establishing UAV self-awareness ability for the deployed environment via using proposed models is also provided in this paper.

The final exponentiation affects the efficiency of pairing computations especially on pairing-friendly curves with high embedding degree. We propose an efficient method for computing the hard part of the final exponentiation on the KSS18 curve at the 192-bit security level. Implementations indicate that the computation of the final exponentiation is 8.74% faster than the previously fastest result.

This paper details the design of a plate that controls the beam direction in an aperture array excited by a waveguide 2-plane hybrid coupler. The beam direction can be controlled in the range of ±15-32deg. in the quasi H-plane, and ±26-54deg. in the quasi E-plane at the design frequency of 66.425GHz. Inductive irises are introduced into tapered waveguides in the plate and the reflection is suppressed by narrow apertures. A plate that has a larger tilt angle in the quasi E-plane and another plate with conventional rectangular waveguide ports as a reference are fabricated and measured. The measured values agree well with the simulation results.

In this paper, an experimental method is proposed for extracting the primary and secondary parameters of transmission lines with frequency dispersion. So far, there is no report of these methods being applied to transmission lines with frequency dispersion. This paper provides an experimental evaluation means of transmission lines with frequency dispersion and clarifies the issues when applying the proposed method. In the proposed experimental method, unnecessary components such as connectors are removed by using a simple de-embedding method. The frequency response of the primary and secondary parameters extracted by using the method reproduced all dispersion characteristics of a transmission line with frequency dispersion successfully. It is demonstrated that an accurate RLGC equivalent-circuit model is obtained experimentally, which can be used to quantitatively evaluate the frequency/time responses of shielded-FPC with frequency dispersion and to validate RLGC equivalent-circuit models extracted by using electromagnetic field analysis.

Given a graph G=(V, E), where V and E are vertex and edge sets of G, and a subset VNT of vertices called a non-terminal set, a spanning tree with a non-terminal set VNT, denoted by STNT, is a connected and acyclic spanning subgraph of G that contains all vertices of V where each vertex in a non-terminal set is not a leaf. On general graphs, the problem of finding an STNT of G is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we show that if G is a circular-arc graph then finding an STNT of G is polynomially solvable with respect to the number of vertices.

Feature representation is a key component of most visual tracking algorithms. It is difficult to deal with complex appearance changes with low-level hand-crafted features due to weak representation capacities of such features. In this paper, we propose a novel tracking algorithm through combining a joint dictionary pair learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN). We utilize CNN model that is trained on ImageNet-Vid to extract target features. The CNN includes three convolutional layers and two fully connected layers. A dictionary pair learning follows the second fully connected layer. The joint dictionary pair is learned upon extracted deep features by the trained CNN model. The temporal variations of target appearances are learned in the dictionary learning. We use the learned dictionaries to encode target candidates. A linear combination of atoms in the learned dictionary is used to represent target candidates. Extensive experimental evaluations on OTB2015 demonstrate the superior performances against SOTA trackers.

This paper presents a fully integrated yet compact receiver front-end for Sub-GHz applications such as Internet-of-Things (IoT). The low noise amplifier (LNA) matching network leverages an inductance boosting technique. A relatively small on-chip inductor with a compact area achieves impedance matching in such a low frequency. Moreover, a passive-mixer-first mode bypasses the LNA to extend the receiver dynamic-range. The passive mixer provides matching to the 50Ω antenna interface to eliminate the need for additional passive components. Therefore, the receiver can be fully-integrated without any off-chip matching components. The flipped-voltage-follower (FVF) cell is adopted in the low pass filter (LPF) and the variable gain amplifier (VGA) for its high linearity and low power consumption. Fabricated in 65nm LP CMOS process, the proposed receiver front-end occupies 0.37mm2 core area, with a tolerable input power ranging from -91.5dBm to -1dBm for 500kbps GMSK signal at 924MHz frequency. The power consumption is 1mW power under a 1.2V supply.

This paper presents robust optimization models for minimizing the required backup capacity while providing probabilistic protection against multiple simultaneous failures of physical machines under uncertain virtual machine capacities in a cloud provider. If random failures occur, the required capacities for virtual machines are allocated to the dedicated backup physical machines, which are determined in advance. We consider two uncertainties: failure event and virtual machine capacity. By adopting a robust optimization technique, we formulate six mixed integer linear programming problems. Numerical results show that for a small size problem, our presented models are applicable to the case that virtual machine capacities are uncertain, and by using these models, we can obtain the optimal solution of the allocation of virtual machines under the uncertainty. A simulated annealing heuristic is presented to solve large size problems. By using this heuristic, an approximate solution is obtained for a large size problem.

To reduce mutual coupling of a two-level nested array (TLNA) with an even number of sensors, we propose an improved array configuration that exhibits all the good properties of the prototype optimal configuration under the constraint of a fixed number of sensors N and achieves reduction of mutual coupling. Compared with the prototype optimal TLNA (POTLNA), which inner level and outer level both have N/2 sensors, those of the improved optimal TLNA (IOTLNA) are N/2-1 and N/2+1. It is proved that the physical aperture and uniform degrees of freedom (uDOFs) of IOTLNA are the same as those of POTLNA, and the number of sensor pairs with small separations of IOTLNA is reduced. We also construct an improved optimal second-order super nested array (SNA) by using the IOTLNA as the parent nested array, termed IOTLNA-SNA, which has the same physical aperture and the same uDOFs, as well as the IOTLNA. Numerical simulations demonstrate the better performance of the improved array configurations.