Locally repairable codes (LRCs) with locality r and availability t are a class of codes which can recover data from erasures by accessing other t disjoint repair groups, that every group contain at most r other code symbols. This letter will investigate constructions of LRCs derived from cyclic codes and generalized quadrangle. On the one hand, two classes of cyclic LRC with given locality m-1 and availability em are proposed via trace function. Our LRCs have the same locality, availability, minimum distance and code rate, but have short length and low dimension. On the other hand, an LRC with $(2,(p+1)lfloorrac{s}{2} floor)$ is presented based on sets of points in PG(k, q) which form generalized quadrangles with order (s, p). For k=3, 4, 5, LRCs with r=2 and different t are determined.

When we collect vital data from exercisers by putting wireless sensor nodes to them, the reliability of the wireless data collection is dependent on the position of node on the body of exerciser, therefore, in order to determine the suitable body position, it is essential to evaluate the data collection performances by changing the body positions of nodes in experiments involving human subjects. However, their fair comparison is problematic, because the experiments have no repeatability, that is, we cannot evaluate the performances for multiple body positions in an experiment at the same time. In this paper, we predict the performances by a software network simulator. Using two main functions such as a channel state function and a mobility function, the network simulator can repeatedly generate the same channel and mobility conditions for nodes. Numerical result obtained by the network simulator shows that when collecting vital data from twenty two footballers in a game, among three body position such as waist, forearm and calf, the forearm position gives the highest data collection rate and the predicted data collection rates agree well with the ones obtained by an experiment involving real subjects.

Multiple human tracking is widely used in various fields such as marketing and surveillance. The typical approach associates human detection results between consecutive frames using the features and bounding boxes (position+size) of detected humans. Some methods use an omnidirectional camera to cover a wider area, but ID switch often occurs in association with detections due to following two factors: i) The feature is adversely affected because the bounding box includes many background regions when a human is captured from an oblique angle. ii) The position and size change dramatically between consecutive frames because the distance metric is non-uniform in an omnidirectional image. In this paper, we propose a novel method that accurately tracks humans with an association metric for omnidirectional images. The proposed method has two key points: i) For feature extraction, we introduce local rectification, which reduces the effect of background regions in the bounding box. ii) For distance calculation, we describe the positions in a world coordinate system where the distance metric is uniform. In the experiments, we confirmed that the Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) improved 3.3 in the LargeRoom dataset and improved 2.3 in the SmallRoom dataset.

This paper presents the feasibility of a capacitive coupler utilizing an electric double layer for wireless power transfer under seawater. Since seawater is an electrolyte solution, an electric double layer (EDL) is formed on the electrode surface of the coupler in direct current. If the EDL can be utilized in radio frequency, it is possible that high power transfer efficiency can be achieved under seawater because a high Q-factor can be obtained. To clarify this, the following steps need taking; First, measure the frequency characteristics of the complex permittivity in seawater and elucidate the behaviors of the EDL from the results. Second, clarify that EDL leads to an improvement in the Q-factor of seawater. It will be shown in this paper that capacitive coupling by EDL occurs using two kinds of the coupler models. Third, design a coupler with high efficiency as measured by the Q-factor and relative permittivity of EDL. Last, demonstrate that the designed coupler under seawater can achieve over 85% efficiency at a transfer distance of 5 mm and feasibility of the coupler with EDL.

This paper reviews our developed wide band human body communication technology for wearable and implantable robot control. The wearable and implantable robots are assumed to be controlled by myoelectric signals and operate according to the operator's will. The signal transmission for wearable robot control was shown to be mainly realized by electrostatic coupling, and the signal transmission for implantable robot control was shown to be mainly determined by the lossy frequency-dependent dielectric properties of human body. Based on these basic observations on signal transmission mechanisms, we developed a 10-50MHz band impulse radio transceiver based on human body communication technology, and applied it for wireless control of a robotic hand using myoelectric signals in the first time. In addition, we also examined its applicability to implantable robot control, and evaluated the communication performance of implant signal transmission using a living swine. These experimental results showed that the proposed technology is well suited for detection and transmission of biological signals for wearable and implantable robot control.

Wireless medical telemetry service (WMTS) is an important wireless communication system in healthcare facilities. Recently, the potential for electromagnetic interference by noise emitted by switching regulators installed in light-emitting diode (LED) lamps has been a serious problem. In this study, we evaluated the characteristics of the electromagnetic noise emitted from LED lamps and its effect on WMTS. Switching regulators generally emit wide band impulsive noise whose bandwidth reaches 400MHz in some instances owing to the switching operation, but this impulsive nature is difficult to identify in the reception of WMTS because the bandwidth of WMTS is much narrower than that of electromagnetic noise. Gaussian approximation (GA) can be adopted for band-limited electromagnetic noise whose characteristics have no repetitive variation. On the other hand, GA with the impulsive correction factor (ICF) can be adopted for band-limited electromagnetic noise that has repetitive variation. We investigate the minimum receiver sensitivity of WMTS for it to be affected by electromagnetic noise emitted from LED lamps. The required carrier-to-noise power ratio (CNR) of Gaussian noise and electromagnetic noise for which GA can be adopted was approximately 15dB, but the electromagnetic noise for which GA with the ICF can be adopted was 3 to 4dB worse. Moreover, the spatial distribution of electromagnetic noise surrounding an LED lamp installation was measured. Finally, we roughly estimated the offset distance between the receiving antenna of WMTS and LED lamps when a WMTS signal of a certain level was added in a clinical setting using our experimental result for the required CNR.

In this letter, an efficient hybrid direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation scheme is devised for massive uniform rectangular array. In this scheme, the DOA estimator based on a two-dimensional (2D) discrete Fourier transform is first applied to acquire coarse initial DOA estimates for single data snapshot. Then, the fine DOA is accurately estimated through using the iterative search estimator within a very small region. Meanwhile, a Nyström-based method is utilized to correctly compute the required noise-subspace projection matrix, avoiding the direct computation of full-dimensional sample correlation matrix and its eigenvalue decomposition. Therefore, the proposed scheme not only can estimate DOA, but also save computational cost, especially in massive antenna arrays scenarios. Simulation results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid estimate scheme.

Goal modeling is a method that describes requirements structurally. Goal modeling mainly consists of two tasks: extraction of goals and organization of the extracted goals. Generally, the process of the goal modeling requires intensive manual intervention and higher modeling skills than the process of the usual requirements description. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose a method that provides systematic supports for constructing goal models. In the method, the requirement analyst answers questions and a goal model is semi-automatically constructed based on the answers made. We develop a prototype tool that implements the proposed method and apply it to two systems. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the method.

Mobile wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are facing threats from malicious nodes that disturb packet transmissions, leading to poor mobile WSN performance. Existing studies have proposed a number of methods, such as decision tree-based classification methods and reputation based methods, to detect these malicious nodes. These methods assume that the malicious nodes follow only pre-defined attack models and have no learning ability. However, this underestimation of the capability of malicious node is inappropriate due to recent rapid progresses in machine learning technologies. In this study, we design reinforcement learning-based malicious nodes, and define a novel observation space and sparse reward function for the reinforcement learning. We also design an adaptive learning method to detect these smart malicious nodes. We construct a robust classifier, which is frequently updated, to detect these smart malicious nodes. Extensive experiments show that, in contrast to existing attack models, the developed malicious nodes can degrade network performance without being detected. We also investigate the performance of our detection method, and confirm that the method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy and false detection rate.

In this paper, we design and develop a sensor-embedded office chair that can measure the posture of the office worker continuously without disturbing their job. In our system, eight accelerometers, that are attached at the back side of the fabric surface of the chair, are used for recognizing the posture. We propose three sitting posture recognition algorithms by considering the initial position of the chair and the difference of physique. Through the experiment with 28 participants, we confirm that our proposed chair can recognize the sitting posture by 75.4% (algorithm 1), 83.7% (algorithm 2), and 85.6% (algorithm 3) respectively.

Biometric template protection techniques have been proposed to address security and privacy issues inherent to biometric-based authentication systems. However, it has been shown that the robustness of most of such techniques against reversibility and linkability attacks are overestimated. Thus, a thorough security analysis of recently proposed template protection schemes has to be carried out. Negative iris recognition is an interesting iris template protection scheme based on the concept of negative databases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive security analysis of this scheme in order to validate its practical usefulness. Although the authors of negative iris recognition claim that their scheme possesses both irreversibility and unlinkability, we demonstrate that more than 75% of the original iris-code bits can be recovered using a single protected template. Moreover, we show that the negative iris recognition scheme is vulnerable to attacks via record multiplicity where an adversary can combine several transformed templates to recover more proportion of the original iris-code. Finally, we demonstrate that the scheme does not possess unlinkability. The experimental results, on the CASIA-IrisV3 Interval public database, support our theory and confirm that the negative iris recognition scheme is susceptible to reversibility, linkability, and record multiplicity attacks.

In this paper, experimental data of non-arcing circuit breaking phenomena in electrical contacts are presented. A dark bridge that is a non-luminous bridge between electrical contacts is an effective factor for the non-arcing circuit break. A facility of a cantilever system was established to precisely control a position of an electrode. By using this facility, dark bridges between contacts were made and the dark bridges were observed by a microscopic camera system.

To solve the problem of the self-deployment of heterogeneous directional wireless sensor networks in 3D space, this paper proposes a weighted Voronoi diagram-based self-deployment algorithm (3DV-HDDA) in 3D space. To improve the network coverage ratio of the monitoring area, the 3DV-HDDA algorithm uses the weighted Voronoi diagram to move the sensor nodes and introduces virtual boundary torque to rotate the sensor nodes, so that the sensor nodes can reach the optimal position. This work also includes an improvement algorithm (3DV-HDDA-I) based on the positions of the centralized sensor nodes. The difference between the 3DV-HDDA and the 3DV-HDDA-I algorithms is that in the latter the movement of the node is determined by both the weighted Voronoi graph and virtual force. Simulations show that compared to the virtual force algorithm and the unweighted Voronoi graph-based algorithm, the 3DV-HDDA and 3DV-HDDA-I algorithms effectively improve the network coverage ratio of the monitoring area. Compared to the virtual force algorithm, the 3DV-HDDA algorithm increases the coverage from 75.93% to 91.46% while the 3DV-HDDA-I algorithm increases coverage from 76.27% to 91.31%. When compared to the unweighted Voronoi graph-based algorithm, the 3DV-HDDA algorithm improves the coverage from 80.19% to 91.46% while the 3DV-HDDA-I algorithm improves the coverage from 72.25% to 91.31%. Further, the energy consumption of the proposed algorithms after 60 iterations is smaller than the energy consumption using a virtual force algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the 3DV-HDDA and the 3DV-HDDA-I algorithms.

This paper investigates the secrecy energy efficiency maximization (SEEM) problem in a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system, wherein a legitimate user (LU) exploits the power splitting (PS) scheme for simultaneous information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH). To prevent interference from eavesdroppers on the LU, artificial noise (AN) is incorporated into the confidential signal at the transmitter. We maximize the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) by joining the power of the confidential signal, the AN power, and the PS ratio, while taking into account the minimum secrecy rate requirement of the LU, the required minimum harvested energy, the allowed maximum radio frequency transmission power, and the PS ratio. The formulated SEEM problem involves nonconvex fractional programming and is generally intractable. Our solution is Lagrangian relaxation method than can transform the original problem into a two-layer optimization problem. The outer layer problem is a single variable optimization problem with a Lagrange multiplier, which can be solved easily. Meanwhile, the inner layer one is fractional programming, which can be transformed into a subtractive form solved using the Dinkelbach method. A closed-form solution is derived for the power of the confidential signal. Simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed SEEM algorithm and prove that AN-aided design is an effective method for improving system SEE.

Media Access Control (MAC) is critical to guarantee different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks, such as high reliability for safety packets and high throughput for service packets. Meanwhile, due to their ability to provide lower delay and higher data rates, more UAVs are using frequently directional antennas. However, it is challenging to support different QoS in UAV networks with directional antennas, because of the high mobility of UAV which causes serious channel resource loss. In this paper, we propose CU-MAC which is a MAC protocol for Centralized UAV networks with directional antennas. First, we design a mobility prediction based time-frame optimization scheme to provide reliable broadcast service for safety packets. Then, a traffic prediction based channel allocation scheme is proposed to guarantee the priority of video packets which are the most common service packets nowadays. Simulation results show that compared with other representative protocols, CU-MAC achieves higher reliability for safety packets and improves the throughput of service packets, especially video packets.

The interval in ℕ composed of finite states of the stream version of asymmetric binary systems (ABS) is irreducible if it admits an irreducible finite-state Markov chain. We say that the stream version of ABS is irreducible if its interval is irreducible. Duda gave a necessary condition for the interval to be irreducible. For a probability vector (p,1-p), we assume that p is irrational. Then, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for the interval to be irreducible. The obtained conditions imply that, for a sufficiently small ε, if p∈(1/2,1/2+ε), then the stream version of ABS could not be practically irreducible.

Air quality index (AQI) is a non-dimensional index for the description of air quality, and is widely used in air quality management schemes. A novel method for Air Quality Index Forecasting based on Deep Dictionary Learning (AQIF-DDL) and machine vision is proposed in this paper. A sky image is used as the input of the method, and the output is the forecasted AQI value. The deep dictionary learning is employed to automatically extract the sky image features and achieve the AQI forecasting. The idea of learning deeper dictionary levels stemmed from the deep learning is also included to increase the forecasting accuracy and stability. The proposed AQIF-DDL is compared with other deep learning based methods, such as deep belief network, stacked autoencoder and convolutional neural network. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method leads to good performance on AQI forecasting.

This paper proposes a chirp-BOK modulation scheme for VLF (Very low frequency, 3-30kHz) communication under symmetric alpha-stable (SαS) noise. The atmospheric noise which is the main interference in VLF communication is more accurately characterized as SαS distribution in the previous literatures. Chirp-BOK, one of the chirp spread spectrum (CSS) technologies is widely used for its anti-interference performance and constant envelope properties. However, up-chirp and down-chirp are not strictly orthogonal, the bit error rate (BER) performance of chirp-BOK system is no longer improved with the increase of time-bandwidth product. So in this paper, the influence of non-orthogonal modulation waveform on the system is considered, and the model of the optimal parameters for chirp-BOK is derived from the perspective of minimum BER under gaussian noise and SαS noise respectively. Simulations for chirp-BOK scheme under gaussian noise and SαS noise with different α validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In resource-constrained network function virtualization (NFV) environments, it is expected that data throughput for service chains is maintained by using virtual network functions (VNFs) effectively. In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the total data throughput in resource-constrained NFV environments. Moreover, based on our formulated optimization problem, we propose a heuristic service chain construction algorithm for maximizing the total data throughput. This algorithm also determines the placement of VNFs, the amount of resources for each VNF, and the transmission route for each service chain. It is expected that the heuristic algorithm can construct service chains more quickly than the meta-heuristic algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methods with simulations, and we investigate the effectiveness of our proposed heuristic algorithm through a performance comparison. Numerical examples show that our proposed methods can construct service chains so as to maximize the total data throughput regardless of the number of service chains, the amount of traffic, and network topologies.

Virtual network embedding has been intensively studied for a decade. The time complexity of most conventional methods has been reduced to the cube of the number of links. Since customers are likely to request a dense virtual network that connects every node pair directly (|E|=O(|V|2)) based on a traffic matrix, the time complexity is actually O(|E|3=|V|6). If we were allowed to reduce this dense network to a sparse one before embedding, the time complexity could be decreased to O(|V|3); the time saving would be of the order of a million times for |V|=100. The network reduction, however, combines several virtual links into a broader link, which makes the embedding cost (solution quality) much worse. This paper analytically and empirically investigates the trade-off between the embedding time and cost for the virtual network reduction. We define two simple reduction operations and analyze them with several interesting theorems. The analysis indicates that an exponential drop in embedding time can be achieved with a linear increase in embedding cost. A rigorous numerical evaluation justifies the desirability of the trade-off.