In this letter, the effect of the time difference of arrival (TDoA) on synchronous types or asynchronous types of OFDMA-based multi-hop relay (MR) systems is investigated. Signal-to-interference plus noise ratios (SINRs) for downlinks and uplinks are defined to measure the degree of interference due to TDoA in asymmetric MR systems. A path selection technique based on the SINR is then proposed to determine the optimal paths for the uplink and downlink independently. It is shown that asymmetric routing can improve the performance of OFDMA-based MR systems when the proposed technique is applied to the path selection of the uplink taking into account the effect of the TDoA.

In this paper, the new residue number system (RNS) moduli sets {22n, 2n -1, 2n+1 -1} and {22n, 2n -1, 2n-1 -1} are introduced. These moduli sets have 4n-bit dynamic range and well-formed moduli which can result in high-performance residue to binary converters as well as efficient RNS arithmetic unit. Next, efficient residue to binary converters for the proposed moduli sets based on mixed-radix conversion (MRC) algorithm are presented. The converters are ROM-free and they are realized using carry-save adders and modulo adders. Comparison with the other residue to binary converters for 4n-bit dynamic range moduli sets shown that the presented designs based on new moduli sets {22n, 2n -1, 2n+1 -1} and {22n, 2n -1, 2n-1 -1} are improved the conversion delay and result in hardware savings. Also, the proposed moduli sets can lead to efficient binary to residue converters, and they can speed-up internal RNS arithmetic processing, compared with the other 4n-bit dynamic range moduli sets.

The performance of ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) receiver based on the RAKE maximal ratio combiner (MRC) followed by a zero forcing (ZF) detector is analytically examined. For a UWB MIMO system with NT transmit antennas, NR receive antennas, and L resolvable multipath components, the proposed MIMO detection scheme is shown to have the diversity order of LNR-NT+1 and its analytical error rate expression is presented in a log-normal fading channel. We also compare the analytical BERs with the simulated results.

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme of cooperative relaying network based on data exchange between relays before forwarding their received data to destination. This inter-relay data exchange step is done during an additional middle-slot in order to enhance the transmit signals from relays to the destination under low transmit power condition. To reduce the propagation errors between relays as well as the required transmit power during this data exchange, only the relay possessing the highest SNR is engaged into exchanging data by forwarding its received signal to the other relays. As for the remaining non-selected relays, i.e. with low SNR, the transmitted signal is estimated by using both signals received separately at different time slots (i.e., 1st and 2nd slot) from source and the 'best' selected relay, respectively, emulating virtual antenna array where appropriate weights for the antenna array are developed. In addition, we investigate distributed transmit beamforming and maximum ratio combining at the relays and the destination, respectively, to combine coherently the received signals. At the relay optimal location and for low SNR condition, the proposed method has significant better outage behavior and average throughput than conventional methods using one or two time slots for transmission.

We propose an MRAM macro architecture for SoCs to reduce their area size. The shared write-selection transistor (SWST) architecture is based on 2T1MTJ MRAM cell technology, which enables the same fast access time with a smaller cell area than that of 6T SRAMs. We designed a 4-Mb macro using the SWST architecture with a 0.15-µm CMOS process and a 0.24-µm MRAM process. The macro cell array consists of 81T64MTJ cell array elements, each storing 64 bits of data. The area size is reduced by more than 30%. By introducing a leakage-replication (LR) read scheme, a wide read margin on a test chip is accomplished and 50-ns access time is achieved with SPICE simulation. The 2T1MTJ macro and 81T64MTJ macro can be integrated into a single SoC.

In static wireless ad hoc networks such as wireless mesh networks and wireless sensor networks, multipath routing techniques are very useful for improving end-to-end delay, throughput, and load balancing, as compared to single-path routing techniques. When determining multiple paths, however, multipath routing protocols should address the well-known route coupling problem that results from a geographic proximity of adjacent routes and that hampers performance gain. Although a lot of multipath routing protocols have been proposed, most of them focused on obtaining node or link-disjoint multipaths. In order to address the route coupling problem, some multipath routing protocols utilizing zone-disjointness property were proposed. However, they suffer from an overhead of control traffic or require additional equipment such as directional antenna. This paper therefore proposes a novel multipath routing protocol, based on geographical information with low overhead, called 3-directional zone-disjoint multipath routing protocol (3DMRP). 3DMRP searches up to three zone-disjoint paths by using two techniques: 1) greedy forwarding, and 2) RREP-overhearing. One primary and two secondary paths are obtained via greedy forwarding in order to reduce control overhead, and these secondary paths are found by avoiding the RREP overhearing zone created during the primary path acquisition. In particular, two versions of 3DMRP are introduced in order to avoid the RREQ-overhearing zone. Through ns-2 simulations, 3DMRP is evaluated to verify that it achieves performance improvements in terms of throughput and control overhead.

This paper presents methods for controlling the intensity of emotional expressions and speaking styles of an arbitrary speaker's synthetic speech by using a small amount of his/her speech data in HMM-based speech synthesis. Model adaptation approaches are introduced into the style control technique based on the multiple-regression hidden semi-Markov model (MRHSMM). Two different approaches are proposed for training a target speaker's MRHSMMs. The first one is MRHSMM-based model adaptation in which the pretrained MRHSMM is adapted to the target speaker's model. For this purpose, we formulate the MLLR adaptation algorithm for the MRHSMM. The second method utilizes simultaneous adaptation of speaker and style from an average voice model to obtain the target speaker's style-dependent HSMMs which are used for the initialization of the MRHSMM. From the result of subjective evaluation using adaptation data of 50 sentences of each style, we show that the proposed methods outperform the conventional speaker-dependent model training when using the same size of speech data of the target speaker.

This paper presents the computational electromagnetic dosimetry inside an anatomically based pregnant woman models exposed to electromagnetic wave during magnetic resonance imaging. The two types of pregnant woman models corresponding to early gestation and 26 weeks gestation were used for this study. The specific absorption rate (SAR) in and around a fetus were calculated by radiated electromagnetic wave from highpass and lowpass birdcage coil. Numerical calculation results showed that high SAR region is observed at the body in the vicinity of gaps of the coil, and is related to concentrated electric field in the gaps of human body such as armpit and thigh. Moreover, it has confirmed that the SAR in the fetus is less than International Electrotechnical Commission limit of 10 W/kg, when whole-body average SARs are 2 W/kg and 4 W/kg, which are the normal operating mode and first level controlled operating mode, respectively.

In this paper, we derive the average bit error probability (BEP) for common digital modulation schemes and the outage probability of double Nakagami-m channels with MRC diversity. First, the probability density function (PDF) and moment generating function (MGF) of received signal with maximal ratio combining (MRC) receiver diversity are computed. The derived MGF results are simplified in terms of a generalized hypergeometric function 2F0. The derived BEP expressions find applications in existing wireless systems such as satellite mobile communication system, mobile-to-mobile communication system and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication system. In addition, the obtained general MGF expression considers combined Rayleigh Nakagami-m, double Rayleigh, single Rayleigh, single Nakagami-m, and non-fading or additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels as special cases. The simulation results agree well with the theoretical results.

This letter proposes an efficient uplink scheduling algorithm for the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service with variable frame-duration according to the voice activity in IEEE 802.16e/m systems. The proposed algorithm dynamically changes the grant-interval to save the uplink bandwidth, and it uses the random access scheme when the voice activity changes from silent-period to talk-spurt. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can increase the VoIP capacity by 26 percent compared to the conventional extended real-time polling service (ertPS).

This letter proposes a simple iterative decoding algorithm for the concatenation codes where the outer code is single-parity-check (SPC) code. The erroneous inner codewords are iteratively combined with maximum ratio combining (MRC) and then re-decoded. Compared with the conventional scheme where the RS outer code concatenation is algebraically decoded to recover the erasures, the proposed scheme has better performance due to MRC processing. On the other hand, the proposed scheme is less complex because the linear combination is simpler than algebraical decoding and the MRC gain can loose the requirement for inner decoder.

This paper proposes a fast, efficient detection algorithm of missing data (also referred to as blotches) based on Markov Random Field (MRF) models with less computational load and a lower false alarm rate than the existing MRF-based blotch detection algorithms. The proposed algorithm can reduce the computational load by applying fast block-matching motion estimation based on the diamond searching pattern and restricting the attention of the blotch detection process to only the candidate bloch areas. The problem of confusion of the blotches is frequently seen in the vicinity of a moving object due to poorly estimated motion vectors. To solve this problem, we incorporate a weighting function with respect to the pixels, which are accurately detected by our moving edge detector and inputed into the formulation. To solve the blotch detection problem formulated as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem, an iterated conditional modes (ICM) algorithm is used. The experimental results show that our proposed method results in fewer blotch detection errors than the conventional blotch detectors, and enables lower computational cost and the more efficient detecting performance when compared with existing MRF-based detectors.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of maximum ratio combining (MRC) in the presence of multiple cochannel interferences over a flat Rayleigh fading channel. Closed-form expressions of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), outage probability, and average symbol error rate (SER) of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) with M-ary signaling are obtained for unequal-power interference-to-noise ratio (INR). We also provide an upper-bound for the average SER using moment generating function (MGF) of the SINR. Moreover, we quantify the array gain loss between pure MRC (MRC system in the absence of CCI) and MRC system in the presence of CCI. Finally, we verify our analytical results by numerical simulations.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) maximum-SNR (max-SNR) system employs the maximum ratio combiner (MRC) at the receiver side and the maximum ratio transmitter (MRT) at the transmitter side. Its performances highly depend on MIMO channel characteristics, which vary according to both the number of antennas and their distribution between the transmitter and receiver sides. By using the decomposition of the ordered Wishart distribution in the uncorrelated Rayleigh case, we derived a closed-form expression of the largest eigenvalue probability density function (PDF). The final result yields to an expression form of the PDF where polynomials are multiplied by exponentials; it is worth underlining that, though this form had been previously observed for given couples of antennas, to date no formally-written closed-form was available in the literature for an arbitrary couple. Then, this new expression permits one to quickly and easily get the well known largest eigenvalue PDF and use it to determine the binary error probability (BEP) of the max-SNR.

In this letter, we propose a coding mode selection method for the AMR-WB+ audio coder based on a decision tree. In order to reduce computation while maintaining good performance, decision tree classifier is adopted with the closed loop mode selection results as the target classification labels. The size of the decision tree is controlled by pruning, so the proposed method does not increase the memory requirement significantly. Through an evaluation test on a database covering both speech and music materials, the proposed method is found to achieve a much better mode selection accuracy compared with the open loop mode selection module in the AMR-WB+.

Recent advancements in the ubiquitous sensor network field have brought considerable feasibility to the realization of a ubiquitous society. A ubiquitous sensor network will enable the cooperative gathering of environmental information or the detection of special events through a large number of spatially distributed sensor nodes. Thus far, radio frequency identification (RFID) as an application for realizing the ubiquitous environment has mainly been developed for public and industrial systems. To this end, the most existing applications have demanded low-end antennas. In recent years, interests of ubiquitous sensor network have been broadened to medical body area networks (BAN), wireless personal area networks (WPAN), along with ubiquitous smart worlds. This increasing attention toward in ubiquitous sensor network has great implications for antennas. The design of functional antennas has received much attention because they can provide various kinds of properties and operation modes. These high-end antennas have some functions besides radiation. Furthermore, smart sensor nodes equipped with cooperated high-end antennas would allow them to respond adaptively to environmental events. Therefore, some design approaches of functional antennas with sensing and reconfigurability as high-end solution for smart sensor node, as well as low-end antennas for mobile RFID (mRFID) and SAW transponder are presented in this paper.

Image segmentation is an essential processing step for many image analysis applications. In this paper, a novel image segmentation algorithm using fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) with spatial constraints based on Markov random field (MRF) via Bayesian theory is proposed. Due to disregard of spatial constraint information, the FCM algorithm fails to segment images corrupted by noise. In order to improve the robustness of FCM to noise, a powerful model for the membership functions that incorporates local correlation is given by MRF defined through a Gibbs function. Then spatial information is incorporated into the FCM by Bayesian theory. Therefore, the proposed algorithm has both the advantages of the FCM and MRF, and is robust to noise. Experimental results on the synthetic and real-world images are given to demonstrate the robustness and validity of the proposed algorithm.

In recent years, some countermeasures have been proposed against differential power analysis (DPA) at the basic composition element level of logic circuits. We propose a countermeasure named random switching logic (RSL). RSL involves computation with data masking using a single logic gate and suppression of transient transitions using ENABLE signals generated independently of input data. Recently, some countermeasures that were proposed against DPA, such as MRSL and DRSL, adopted the concept of RSL. Although MRSL is based on RSL, it uses a different method to suppress the transient transitions. DRSL uses RSL to avoid the possibility of leakage caused by a difference in delays occurring in MDPL that combines dual-rail circuits with random masking. The important difference between these countermeasures and RSL is that they can vary the output transition timing depending on the input data patterns. In this paper, we focus on this feature to evaluate the DPA resistance of MRSL and DRSL. Experiments are also conducted on DPA resistance by using an FPGA to verify the evaluation results. It is confirmed that in both MRSL and DRSL, there is a possibility of leakage if a sufficient difference in delays exists in input signals.

A novel low-complexity iterative receiver for coded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is proposed in this letter. The iterative receiver uses the parallel interference cancellation (PIC)-maximum ratio combining (MRC) detector for MIMO-OFDM detection, which is a popular alternative to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) detector due to its lower computational complexity. However, we have found that the conventional PIC-MRC detector tends to underestimate the magnitude of its output log likelihood ratios (LLRs). Based on this discovery, we propose to multiply these LLRs by a constant factor, which is optimized according to the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart of the soft-in soft-out (SISO) detector. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of the PIC-MRC-based receiver with little additional cost in computational complexity, allowing it to closely approach the performance of receiver using the much more complex MMSE detector.

Apart from magnetic random access memories (MRAM), nonvolatile memories cannot be used without causing fatigue. As the use of MRAMs can solve fatigue problems, MRAMs have a large potential to open up large new markets. The manufacturing cost of LSIs cannot be reduced while they have not been produced massively. To increase the size of the MRAM market, new applications, in which MRAMs create added value, are needed. A demo system that models a drive recorder was developed to introduce the novel features of MRAMs, and a 4-Mb MRAM was developed to be used in the demo system.