We discuss optimal estimation of the current location of a mobile robot by matching an image of the scene taken by the robot with the model of the environment. We first present a theoretical accuracy bound and then give a method that attains that bound, which can be viewed as describing the probability distribution of the current location. Using real images, we demonstrate that our method is superior to the naive least-squares method. We also confirm the theoretical predictions of our theory by applying the bootstrap procedure.

Recently, mobile computing has received much attention from database community. Sharing information among mobile users is one of the most challenging issues in mobile computing due to user mobility. Replication is a promising technique to this issue. However, adopting replication into mobile computing is a non-trivial task, since we are still facing other problems such as the lack in disk capacity and wireless network bandwidth used by mobile users. We have proposed a dynamic replica allocation strategy called User Majority Replica Allocation (UMRA) that is well suited to the modern architecture of mobile computing environment while avoiding such problems mentioned above. In this paper, we propose two relocation decision policies for UMRA and we provide a cost analysis for them. We also provide a cost analysis for another replica allocation strategy called Static Replica Allocation (SRA) for a comparison purpose.

This letter addresses how to set SIR targets higher than normally required, in order to mitigate the effect of signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) measurement error included in power control steps. We find that scaling up the SIR targets by 1 dB is conformable to resisting SIR measurement error for code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile systems.

This paper proposes genetic algorithms (GAs) for path planning and trajectory planning of an autonomous mobile robot. Our GA-based approach has an advantage of adaptivity such that the GAs work even if an environment is time-varying or unknown. Therefore, it is suitable for both off-line and on-line motion planning. We first presents a GA for path planning in a 2D terrain. Simulation results on the performance and adaptivity of the GA on randomly generated terrains are shown. Then, we discuss an extension of the GA for solving both path planning and trajectory planning simultaneously.

The paper investigates several approaches for designing and implementing integration environments. Such an environment is developed for the purpose to allow cooperative interactions between distributed and heterogeneous systems. A possible approach to achieve system integration is to use the warehousing technology which engenders the development of data warehousing environments. These environments are information repositories that are available for queries and analysis. In order to manage efficiently a data warehouse, software agents enhanced with mobility mechanisms are introduced. A software agent is an autonomous entity having the abilities to collaborate with each other and to answer users' needs. Furthermore, to perform their operations software agents can migrate off their hosts and roam the network to gather relevant information. This research is part of the SAMDW project which aims at developing a new generation of data warehouses.

This paper discusses a new form of network database access with mobile agent technology, where many small database servers are distributed geographically, and are accessed through dial-up network on-demand. Coined "scattered database access" here, it enables such interesting ways of data access as asynchronous, circulatory, and the-more-you-spend-the-more-you-get kind of access. Databases to be accessed are relational databases, possibly from many different vendors, and PDM databases, also from several vendors. Relational databases, or RDBs, can be accessed by the SQL, an international standard that allows the interoperability of different RDB products in general. On the other hand, PDM databases, the data-stores for Product Data Management software, are not as inter-operable as RDBs, since the product-specific set of APIs has to be used to access them. An SQL-like language and a parser framework have been introduced to solve this problem. By implementing the parser as an object-oriented framework, the workload to adapt to many PDM products has been greatly reduced. The design and preliminary implementation has been carried out in a government-sponsored CALS project in Japan, and has been proven viable in the field, where a large steel-making company gathering information from many subordinate companies around the steel plant, and from other steel companies and equipment manufacturers.

This paper proposes an intelligent and autonomous radio resource management scheme for a multi-layered cellular system with different assigned bandwidths to achieve flexible and high capacity wireless communication systems under any traffic conditions, especially under nonuniform traffic conditions. In the proposed system, terminals with lower mobility are connected to the wideband microcell systems to achieve higher system capacity, and terminals with higher mobility are connected to the narrowband macrocell systems to reduce intercell hand-off frequency. To flexibly cope with variations of traffic conditions, radio spectrum is adaptively and autonomously shared by both systems, and its control is conducted by each microcell base station. Moreover, at the existence of nonuniform traffic conditions , the proposed system introduces downlink power control for the microcells and graceful degradation thereby achieving high system capacity even under such extraordinary traffic situations . Computer simulation confirms that the proposed scheme can achieve lower blocking probability than the centralized scheme especially under nonuniform traffic conditions.

This paper proposes a new wireless multimedia communication system based on hierarchical modulation, which gives unequal transmission reliability corresponding to the sensitivity to the transmission errors. In order to achieve high quality multimedia communication in a band-limited and time-variant fading channel, the proposed scheme changes the modulation scheme according to the contents of information. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed system is an effective high-quality and high-speed multimedia transmission technique in fading channel.

The binary parallel concatenated codes called turbo codes provide relatively large coding gains with reasonable computation complexity. The application of turbo codes to a coherent DS-CDMA mobile radio link with antenna diversity and coherent RAKE combining is considered. A soft-in/soft-out Viterbi decoder that requires less computation complexity is employed instead of maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) decoder. The effect of turbo codes on the achievable bit error rate (BER) performance in frequency selective multipath fading channels is evaluated by computer simulation. It is demonstrated that turbo codes can achieve better BER performance than convolutional codes having the same code rate for the relatively large interleaver size. How the coding gains are impacted by the interleaver size and constraint length of the turbo codes and by the propagation channel condition (power delay profile, the number of resolvable propagation paths, and the maximum Doppler frequency) is discussed.

Wideband wireless access based on DS-CDMA (W-CDMA) is a promising access technique for the 3rd generation mobile communication systems using 2 GHz carrier frequencies. In this paper, several promising techniques to enhance significantly the link performance or capacity are identified. They are (a) interference reduction techniques: interference cancellation and adaptive antenna array (b) required E b/I0 reduction techniques: channel coding and adaptive transmit power control (TPC). For the last decade, many theoretical studies have been done on interference cancellation and adaptive antenna array techniques. Now, it is time to implement real hardware to demonstrate their capabilities under real mobile radio propagation channels. In mobile radio, because of the well-known near/far problem and the adverse effect of fading, fast TPC is indispensable. Currently, a simple closed-loop fast TPC is adopted. The use of a more sophisticated adaptive fast TPC algorithm, which can adapt its power up/down step size according to the variations in channel conditions, may reduce the power control error, resulting in reduced interference to other users. Fast TPC and channel coding work complementarily against fading. Channel coding is another interesting area of research. Turbo coding is the most promising technique. In this paper, the above mentioned techniques are introduced. Preliminary experimental results of interference cancellation and adaptive antenna array techniques are also presented.

In the IETF, discussions on the authentication method of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) message are active and several methods have been proposed. These related specifications were published and circulated as the IETF Internet-Drafts. However, they still have several drawbacks. One of the major drawbacks is that any user can reuse addresses illegally. A user can use an expired address that was allocated to a host. This kind of "illegal use" of the addresses managed by the DHCP server may cause serious security problems. In order to solve them, we propose a new access control method to be used as the DHCP message authentication mechanism. Furthermore, we have designed and developed the DAG (DHCP Access Control Gateway) according to our method. The DAG serves as a gateway that allows only network accesses from clients with the address legally allocated by the DHCP server. This provides secure DHCP service if DHCP servers do not have an authentication mechanism, which is most likely to occur. If a DHCP server has such an authentication scheme as being proposed in IETF Internet-Draft, the DAG can offer a way to enable only a specific client to access the network.

This paper presents an integrated network configuration of wired and wireless access systems for nomadic computing and discusses the virtual LAN on a wireless access system. Furthermore, different types of ad hoc networks are summarized to delineate nomadic computing styles. In terms of user mobility, the integrated network provides a seamless connection environment, so a user can move between wireless and wired networks without dropping data communication sessions. This function is critical for nomadic computing users. By defining the integrated network and employing a virtual LAN, a nomadic computing environment can be realized. This paper reviews the key issues to realize integrated networks. They are mobile management including mobile IP, virtual IP and Logical Office, a high performance MAC, and security control.

An experiment is reported comparing six pen input strategies for selecting a small target using five diffenent sized targets (1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 dot diameter circles respectively, 0. 36 mm per dot). The results showed that the best strategy, in terms of error rate, selection time and subjective preferences, was the "land-on2" strategy where the target is selected when the pen-tip touches the target for the first time after landing on the screen surface. Moreover, "the smallest maximum size" was determined to be 5 dots (1. 8 mm). This was the largest size among the targets which had a significant main effect on error rate in the six strategies. These results are important for both researchers and designers of pen-based systems.

Inter-cell asynchronous DS-CDMA cellular mobile radio allows continuous system deployment from outdoors to indoors since no outer timing source is required. All the forward link channels(control and traffic channels)of each cell site are first spread by orthogonal short spreading codes and then randomized by a long random code uniquely assigned to each cell site. However, inter-cell asynchronous systems generally require much longer cell search time than inter-cell synchronous systems. This paper proposes a fast cell search algorithm based on the periodic masking of the long random code when transmitting the control channel(CCH)signal. The same short spreading code is used for the CCHs of all cell sites. The same short spreading code periodically appears in the signals transmitted from all cell sites so the mobile station can detect the long random code timing(or more precisely the masking timing)by using a matched filter. By grouping the long random codes used in the system and transmitting a group identification(GI)code from each cell site during the masking period, we can avoid searching all long random codes. This significantly reduces the cell search time. Simulation results demonstrate that cell search can be accomplished in less than 500 ms at 90% of the locations when the number of long random codes(having a repetition period of 10 ms)is 512 and the number of those per group is 32.

A slow frequency-hopping/16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (slow-FH/16QAM) system based on time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) is appropriate for third-generation land mobile cellular communications because of its high immunity to interference. The system uses 16QAM for high spectral efficiency and slow-FH and forward-error-correction (FEC) for high-quality transmission. To reduce sensitivity to interference, the system uses an improved decoding scheme based on a minimum Euclidean-distance which is effective when the interference level is dispersed by FH. The bit error rate (BER) of the system due to interference has been evaluated in a previous study, both theoretically and by computer simulation. Although computer-simulated results showed that the system improved the BER, the hardware feasibility was not considered. This paper presents a hardware implementation of the system and the results of experimental transmission using equipment we developed to verify the system and to confirm the BER performance. The laboratory experimental results indicated that the system could provide high-quality transmission over a channel that has frequency-selective fading and co-channel interference. This system provided an Eb/N0 of 9 dB with space diversity and one of 15 dB without it, when BER=10-3 and fd=120 Hz. Field experiments were also conducted in a suburban area of Tokyo to demonstrate the BER performance. The results meant that the system could lower sensitivity to vehicle velocity more than a system without FH and that the BER performance of the system was improved notably against that of a system without FH, especially at low vehicle velocity.

Personal communication systems are increasingly required to accommodate not only voice traffic, but also various types of data traffic. Generally speaking, voice traffic is symmetric between uplink and downlink, while data traffic can be highly asymmetric. It is therefore inefficient to accommodate data in a conventional TDMA/TDD system with fixed TDD boundary. In this paper, focusing on the continuous data traffic which requires multi-slots in a circuit based TDMA/TDD system, an algorithm is proposed in which the TDD boundary are moved adaptively to accommodate data traffic efficiently. Comparing with the boundary-fixed conventional algorithm, computer simulations confirm that the proposed algorithm has superior performance in the excessive transmission delay of data while maintaining the performance of voice. The intercell interference between mobiles due to different TDD boundaries is also confirmed to be negligible. Moreover, almost the similar performance improvements of the proposed algorithm are confirmed for two different average message sizes of data calls.

This paper describes methods used in the design of a high speed burst modem applied for mobile communication systems. The modem has burst mode operations including burst mode AGC (automatic gain control), burst mode BTR (bit timing recovery), adaptive equalization, and diversity based on a selection algorithm to achieve a higher performance in multipath fading channels. Moreover, the performance of the burst modem, which is developed using analog signal processing devices, DSPs (digital signal processors), and FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), is analyzed experimentally. Results show that the modem can suppress irreducible BER values below 1. 0e-6 and attains a 2 dB implicit diversity gain over multipath fading channels modeled by a two-ray impulse response system with independent Rayleigh fading.

This paper gives laboratory as well as the results of field experiment and describes the implementation of a system developed to evaluate and demonstrate multimedia multimode time division multiple access (MTDMA). The equipment has been developed with the radio transmission technology for future public land mobile telecommunication systems (FPLMTS/IMT-2000) in mind. To meet FPLMTS/IMT-2000 requirements the system employs the following techniques: a hybrid multiplex modulation system consisting of quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM), a high data transmission bit rate of 2 Mbit/sec for QPSK, 4 Mbit/sec for 16QAM, and diversity combining and adaptive equalization technique. For the diversity adaptive equalization technique, we used a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) consisting of one feedback (FB) transversal filter and two feed-forward transversal (FF) filters. The output signals from two branches of space diversity reception antennas are then fed to the two FF filters of the DFE. For middle-speed mobile radio communication for a micro-cellular pedestrian environment, a QPSK modulation system is selected to obtain wide coverage, while for a pico-cellular indoor office environment, the delay spread is small, and a 16QAM modulation system is selected to achieve a high bit rate. The results given here of laboratory and field experiments show the technical feasibility of MTDMA for future public land mobile telecommunication systems.

Pilot symbol-assisted coherent delay-locked code tracking loop (PSA-CDLL) is proposed for DS-CDMA mobile radio. PSA-CDLL applies pilot symbol-assisted coherent channel estimation and uses only the in-phase component of the despread signal for controlling the received spreading code timing. The impact of the multiple access interference (MAI) and background noise can be decreased by about 3 dB compared to non-coherent DLL. The performance of the proposed PSA-CDLL is evaluated by computer simulation. Computer simulation results show that it can significantly reduce the rms tracking jitter of regenerated spreading code replica, thereby improving the bit error rate (BER) performance in fading environments.

Comparative performance evaluation between parallel combinatory CDMA (PC-CDMA) and Direct Sequence CDMA (DS-CDMA) has been conducted for high speed radio communication up to 2 Mbps under a multipath Rayleigh fading environment. For both DS-CDMA and PC-CDMA, user information rate per code of 128 kbps, convolutional code with 1/2 coding rate, the same bit interleaving and QPSK data modulation are applied to get transmission symbol rate of 128 ksps. The chip rate of 4. 096 Mcps is used to investigate the possibility of 2 Mbps transmission using only 5 MHz bandwidth. So the spreading factor of the spreading code is 32 for DS-CDMA. In PC-CDMA, 128 ksps data stream is divided into four 32 ksps data streams and according to the every four bits pattern, corresponding spreading code of spreading factor of 128 and its polarity are selected out of eight candidate spreading codes. In soft decision Viterbi decoding applied to PC-CDMA, branch metric is calculated for every bit by weighting the output levels of the PC-CDMA correlators for eight candidate spreading codes. By computer simulation under vehicular environment model with six multipaths, it has been shown that PC-CDMA can offer more capacity approximately by double than DS-CDMA for both downlink and uplink under the condition such as for vehicular for BER of 10-3, and 2 Mbps transmission per cell for downlink is possible not only in isolated cell condition but also in omni cell condition by PC-CDMA.