The characteristics of hole-assisted fiber (HAF) are investigated both numerically and experimentally in terms of its applicability as a bending-loss insensitive fiber (BIF). We show that HAF with the desired mode-field diameter (MFD), bending-loss and cutoff wavelength characteristics can be roughly designed by taking a few specific structural parameters into consideration. We also show that an optical cord composed of adequately designed HAF realizes satisfactory transmission performance with respect to its multi-path interference (MPI) characteristics. These results reveal that a hole-assisted type BIF will be beneficial for realizing easy and economical installation and maintenance in future access networks.

A new selective retransmission method for HARQ (Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest) systems is proposed. This method can avoid the blindness of symbols retransmission by the transformation of lostmap matrix and simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the number of retransmissions effectively.

The objective of wireless location is to determine the mobile station (MS) location in a wireless cellular communications system. When signals are propagated through non-line-of-sight (NLOS) paths, the measurements at the base stations (BSs) contain large errors which result in poor detectability of an MS by the surrounding BSs. In those situations, it is necessary to integrate all available heterogeneous measurements to improve location accuracy. This paper presents hybrid methods that combine time of arrival (TOA) at three BSs and angle of arrival (AOA) information at the serving BS to obtain a location estimate for the MS. The proposed methods mitigate the NLOS effect by using the weighted sum of the intersections between three TOA circles and the AOA line without requiring the a priori knowledge of NLOS error statistics. Numerical results show that all positioning methods offer improved estimation accuracy over those which rely on the two circles and two lines. The proposed methods always achieve better location accuracy than the Taylor series algorithm (TSA) and the hybrid lines of position algorithm (HLOP) do, regardless of the NLOS error statistics.

This paper presents the loss factors in the post-wall waveguide-fed parallel-plate slot array antenna in the millimeter-wave band. At first, transmission loss is evaluated per unit length by measuring the losses of post-wall waveguides on various substrates with different thicknesses in different bands. Measured results of the frequency dependence agree with theoretical predictions using the effective conductivity and the complex permittivity obtained by the whispering gallery mode resonator method. Then the authors evaluate the antennas with various sizes at 76.5 GHz. The antenna efficiency is evaluated by taking into account the loss factors related to: the transmission loss both in the feed and the parallel plate waveguides, the aperture efficiency and the insertion loss and the reflection of the transition. Also, the loss due to the locally-perturbed currents by the slot radiation is evaluated. The sum of the losses in the prediction quantitatively agrees with the measurement.

Careful inspection of efficiency in a DC-DC converter and its dependence on different parameters have been key concerns for power electronic specialists for a long time ago. Although extensive research has been done on the estimation of power loss for different components in a DC-DC converter separately, there isn't any comprehensive study regarding power loss analysis in a DC-DC converter. In this research, detailed description and necessary considerations in order to analyze the power loss of all components in a Push-Pull DC-DC converter are presented. Push-Pull topology is the best choice for investigating efficiency issues, since it exhibits all different types of power loss that are usually encountered in DC-DC converters. This research proposes and verifies appropriate power loss models for all components in a DC-DC converter that dissipate power. For this purpose, conduction and switching loss models of all the relevant components are fully developed. The related equations are implemented in MATLAB environment to simulate all possible causes of power loss in the converter. In order to provide a test bed for evaluation of the proposed loss models and the converter efficiency, a 50 W Push-Pull DC-DC converter was designed and implemented. The experimental results are in full accordance with the simulation results in different input voltages, load conditions and switching frequencies. It was finally shown that the proposed models accurately estimate the DC-DC converter's efficiency.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems have great advantages, such as high spectrum efficiency and robustness against multipath fading. In order to enhance the advantages, this paper investigates an efficient utilization of both diversity combining and higher-level modulation (adaptive modulation) with a repetition code on the frequency domain in the OFDM systems. The repetition coded OFDM systems can achieve an improvement of performance with such a simple structure as one pair of transmit/receive antennas. In this paper, we derive simple closed-form equations for bit error probability (BEP) and throughput, and then improvements of those performances in the proposed OFDM systems are verified by both theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulation.

This paper proposes a new kind of communication system for air traffic control over the oceans; it is particularly effective at handling high air traffic loads due to many oceanic flights. In this system, each aircraft position report is sent to its relevant ground station by forwardly relaying them via a multi hop ad-hoc network that is formed by the aircraft between this aircraft and the ground station. In addition, an effective multiple access scheme with optimal values is also proposed. This scheme enables the various aircraft involved in relaying the signal to operate autonomously in a flight-route airspace. Furthermore, two useful schemes are proposed for efficient timeslot reuse and timeslot assignment in cases of low aircraft densities: the position aided timeslot reuse (PATR) and distance based timeslot assignment (DBTA), respectively. Finally, another scheme is proposed to improve the achievable relayed packet rate under low aircraft densities, which is called interference-based node selection (IB-NS). In all, the proposed system combined with those three schemes show the availability to utilize this system for air traffic control communications, specifically on high traffic ocean routes.

This paper describes ultra wideband (UWB) radio propagation measurements and modeling for wireless body area network (WBAN) applications in different environments. Several propagation measurement campaigns and associated modelings were carried out in either a radio anechoic chamber or a specific room type; however, dependence of the radio propagation on surrounding environments was not studied. Multipaths (mainly reflected from floor, ceiling, and walls) highly depend on the environment. To address this problem, radio propagation around the human body was measured in a radio anechoic chamber and four different-sized rooms. Parameters in a conventional loss model derived from the measurements were found to significantly diverge and depend on room volume and line-of-sight (LOS)/non-LOS (NLOS) cases. A modified model considering the impact of room volume has been proposed for the LOS/NLOS cases. Different propagation mechanisms were discussed along with parameter derivation. Probability distributions for the UWB propagation losses were also examined.

An antidictionary is particularly useful for data compression, and on-line electrocardiogram (ECG) lossless compression algorithms using antidictionaries have been proposed. They work in real-time with constant memory and give better compression ratios than traditional lossless data compression algorithms, while they only deal with ECG data on a binary alphabet. This paper proposes on-line ECG lossless compression for a given data on a finite alphabet. The proposed algorithm gives not only better compression ratios than those algorithms but also uses less computational space than they do. Moreover, the proposed algorithm work in real-time. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by simulation results.

Reliable data transmission is desirable in wireless sensor networks due to the high packet loss rate during multi-hop transmissions. To reliably transmit data for event-driven applications, packet loss recovery mechanism is needed. For loss recovery, sensor nodes need to keep packets in their buffers until transmissions successfully complete. However, since sensor nodes have limited memory, packets cannot be buffered for a long period of time. This letter proposes an efficient buffer management technique that caches data packets for appropriate amount of time to minimize the resource requirements and at the same time provide reliable data transmission among sensor nodes.

Recently, novel full-diversity full-rate quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (QSTBCs) with power scaling and double-symbol maximum likelihood (ML) decoding was proposed. Specifically, the codes can achieve full-diversity through linearly combining two adequately power scaled orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs). In this letter, we derive expressions for mutual information and post-processing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a system with four transmit antennas. By exploiting these formulas, we propose three transmit antenna grouping (TAG) methods for a closed-loop system with low-rate feedback information. The TAG methods make it possible to provide an excellent error-rate performance even with a low-complexity zero-forcing (ZF) detection, especially in spatially correlated fading channels.

The coding rate of a one-shot Tunstall code for stationary and memoryless sources is investigated in non-universal situations so that the probability distribution of the source is known to the encoder and the decoder. When studying the variable-to-fixed length code, the average coding rate has been defined as (i) the codeword length divided by the average block length. We define the average coding rate as (ii) the expectation of the pointwise coding rate, and prove that (ii) converges to the same value as (i).

This letter treats lossy source coding of binary sources with short linear block codes. It is numerically shown that very simple basis-reprocessing approach yields good rate-distortion performance with manageable computational complexity for small block lengths. The result for code lengths up to 100 outperforms the message-passing based encoding for low-density codes which are several times longer.

The distribution of streaming multicast and real time audio/video applications in the Internet has been quickly increased in the Internet. Commonly, these applications rarely use congestion control and do not fairly share provided network capacity with TCP-based applications such as HTTP, FTP and emails. Therefore, Internet communities will be threatened by the increase of non-TCP-based applications that likely cause a significant increase of traffics congestion and starvation. This paper proposes a set of mechanisms, such as providing various data rates, background traffics, and various scenarios, to act friendly with TCP when sending multicast traffics. By using 8 scenarios of simulations, we use 6 layered multicast transmissions with background traffic Pareto with the shape factor 1.5 to evaluate performance metrics such as throughput, delay/latency, jitter, TCP friendliness, packet loss ratio, and convergence time. Our study shows that non TCP traffics behave fairly and respectful of the co-existent TCP-based applications that run on shared link transmissions even with background traffic. Another result shows that the simulation has low values on throughput, vary in jitter (0-10 ms), and packet loss ratio > 3%. It was also difficult to reach convergence time quickly when involving only non TCP traffics.

Design of high gain and high efficiency antennas is one of the key challenges in antenna engineering and especially in millimeter wave communication systems. Various types of planar waveguide arrays with series-fed traveling wave operation have been developed in Tokyo Tech with the special focus upon efficiency enhancement as well as reduction of fabrication cost. In this review, four kinds of single layer waveguide arrays characterized with the series fed travelling wave operation are surveyed first. To cope with the bandwidth narrowing effects due to long line effects associated with the series fed operation, authors have introduced partially corporate feed embedded in the single layer waveguide. They further extended the study to cover fully corporate feed arrays with multiple layer waveguide as well; a new fabrication technique of diffusion bonding of laminated thin plates has the potential to realize the low cost mass production of multi-layer structures for the millimeter wave application. Secondly, the novel methods for loss evaluation of copper plate substrate are established for the design of post-wall waveguide arrays where dielectric loss and conductor loss is determined in wide range of millimeter wave band, by using the Whispering gallery mode resonator. This enables us to design the planar arrays with the loss taken into account. Finally, the planar arrays are now applied to two kinds of systems in the Tokyo Tech millimeter wave project; the indoor short range file-transfer systems and the outdoor communication systems for the medium range backhaul links. The latter has been field-tested in the model network built in Tokyo Tech Ookayama campus. Early stage progress of the project including unique propagation data is also reported.

We propose the Combined Symbol-based Closed-Loop Orthogonal Space-Time Block Code (CS-CL-OSTBC) for four transmit antennas. In the multiple antenna systems, the CS-CL-OSTBC not only achieves full rate and full diversity with linear maximum-likelihood detection but also obtains higher feedback gain than existing CL-OSTBCs due to more efficient utilization of channel feedback information. In the proposed scheme, all the complex-valued channel coefficients are rotated to positive real values with exact channel phase feedback information. As a result, the channel gain can be expressed as the square of the sum of all positive real values and can obtain the maximum value without any loss. Simulation results on bit error rate performance show that the CS-CL-OSTBC outperforms existing CL-OSTBCs for various modulation schemes.

This paper attempts to analyze theoretically the propagation characteristics in the transverse section of upper body to support on-body wireless communications. The analytical estimation assumes that the human body is structured as a lossy-dielectric circular cylinder with infinite length that consists of the 2/3-muscle equivalent uniform tissue. Each scattering electric field formulation inside and outside of the cylinder is derived for scattering characteristics in the propagation environment including the human body when the source current has the vertical direction to the cylinder surface or the horizontal direction to the cylinder axis. In order to confirm the reliability of the formulation, total electric field distributions at 2.45 GHz are compared with the results by the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. In each current direction, general scattering characteristics and the influence on the total propagation are estimated. Furthermore, from scattering and total electric field intensities evaluated with the variations of operating frequency, radius of the human body, and distance between a source and the human body, propagation characteristics are investigated to assist in the design of a device for on-body propagation channel with the upper body.

Kernel logistic regression (KLR) is a powerful and flexible classification algorithm, which possesses an ability to provide the confidence of class prediction. However, its training--typically carried out by (quasi-)Newton methods--is rather time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an alternative probabilistic classification algorithm called Least-Squares Probabilistic Classifier (LSPC). KLR models the class-posterior probability by the log-linear combination of kernel functions and its parameters are learned by (regularized) maximum likelihood. In contrast, LSPC employs the linear combination of kernel functions and its parameters are learned by regularized least-squares fitting of the true class-posterior probability. Thanks to this linear regularized least-squares formulation, the solution of LSPC can be computed analytically just by solving a regularized system of linear equations in a class-wise manner. Thus LSPC is computationally very efficient and numerically stable. Through experiments, we show that the computation time of LSPC is faster than that of KLR by two orders of magnitude, with comparable classification accuracy.

We propose a new channel adaptive distributed video coding algorithm, which is adaptive to time-varying available bitrate and packet loss ratio. The proposed method controls the quantization parameter according to channel condition of especially error-prone mobile channel. Simulation shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional rate-control-only algorithm.

Least-squares policy iteration is a useful reinforcement learning method in robotics due to its computational efficiency. However, it tends to be sensitive to outliers in observed rewards. In this paper, we propose an alternative method that employs the absolute loss for enhancing robustness and reliability. The proposed method is formulated as a linear programming problem which can be solved efficiently by standard optimization software, so the computational advantage is not sacrificed for gaining robustness and reliability. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach through a simulated robot-control task.