Contact resistance of nickel hardened gold electroplate (NiHG) deposited on nickel-underplated phosphor bronze disk coupons (substrate) after thermal aging was measured with a hard gold-plated beryllium copper alloy pin probe by means of a four-point probe technique, compared to that of cobalt-hardened gold electroplate (CoHG). Surface of NiHG plated coupons after aging was analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to investigate the influence of the oxide film formation during thermal aging on contact resistance of NiHG electroplate, compared to that of CoHG. Initial contact resistance of the NiHG coupons was less than 10 mΩ at a contact forces more than 0.05 N, increased to 10 mΩ at a contact force of 0.05 N after 100 hours aging at 200. In contrast, contact resistance of the CoHG coupons progressively increased with increase in aging time, reached 1000 mΩ even at a contact force of 0.05 N after 52 hours aging. XPS analysis for the NiHG coupons demonstrated that nickel oxide film was formed on the NiHG surface in conformity with parabolic growth kinetics, as cobalt oxide film formed on CoHG surface. However, a thickness of the latter film was approximately 4-fold larger than that of former after 100 hours aging at 200. The small increase in contact resistance of NiHG coupons after aging suggested to be due to inhibitory of nickel oxide film growth on the surface. The cause of relatively low and steady contact resistance of NiHG during thermal aging was discussed.

This paper describes key technologies for establishing a large-scale public switching node system architecture for handling voice and telephony over ATM (VTOA). VTOA is one of the most promising ATM applications, which allows network operating companies to provide a less-expensive but relatively high quality telephone service, by employing voice-data compression and the efficient transmission capabilities of AAL2. We discuss several technical aspects of VTOA handling system architecture, such as the optimum basis for the node, i. e. , STM versus ATM, the appropriate network structure, and suitable signalling. These key points are evaluated from the standpoints of economy, ease of implementation, and extensibility. Our proposed methods should provide the basis for constructing an efficient and cost-effective VTOA handling network.

A packet-based leaky-bucket algorithm functions like the early packet discard (EPD), and accepts a newly arriving packet if the probability that all the cells of the packet are accepted is high. We derive some performance characteristics of the cell and packet arrival processes that are accepted by the leaky-bucket algorithm. From these analyses, a method to determine the values of the parameters of the leaky-bucket algorithm and certain relations between this leaky-bucket algorithm and the generic cell rate algorithm (GCRA) are obtained.

Informally, private information retrieval for k 1 databases (k-PIR) is an interactive scheme that enables a user to make access to (separated) k replicated copies of a database and privately retrieve any single bit out of the n bits of data stored in the database. In this model, "privacy" implies that the user retrieves the bit he is interested in but releases to each database nothing about which bit he really tries to get. Chor et. al. proposed 2-PIR with communication complexity 12 n1/32 that is based on the covering codes. Then Ambainis recursively extended the scheme by Chor et. al. and showed that for each k 2, there exists k-PIR with communication complexity at most ckn1/(2k-1) some constant ck > 0. In this paper, we relax the condition for the covering codes and present time-efficient 2-PIR with communication complexity 12 n1/3. In addition, we generally formulate the recursive scheme by Ambainis and show that for each k 4, there exists k-PIR with communication complexity at most ck' n1/(2k-1) for some constant ck' << ck.

This paper studies the problem of testing concurrent systems considered as blackboxes and specified using asynchronous Communicating Finite State Machines. We present an approach to derive test cases for concurrent systems in a succinct and formal way. The approach addresses the state space explosion problem by introducing a causality relation model and the concept of logical time to express true concurrency and describe timing constraints on events. The conformance relation between test cases and trace observed from the real system is defined, and a new test architecture as well as a test case application is presented according to the conformance relation defined. To improve verdict capability of test cases, the approach is enhanced by relaxing the unit-time assumption to any natural number. And a computationally efficient algorithm for the enhanced approach is presented and the algorithm is evaluated in terms of computational efficiency and verdict capability. Finally the approach is generalized to describe timing constraints by any real numbers.

Mechanical prosthetic cardiac valves generate not only the widely recognized audible closing clicks but also ultrasonic closing clicks, as previously reported by us. A personal-computer-based measurement and analysis system with the bandwidth of 625 kHz has been developed to clarify the characteristics of these ultrasonic closing clicks. Fifty cases in total were assessed clinically, including cases with tilting disk valves, bileaflet valves, and flat disk valves. The ultrasonic closing clicks are damped vibrations continuing for about two milliseconds, and their frequency range was confirmed to be from 8 kHz to 625 kHz, while that of the audible click was up to 8 kHz. Although the sensitivity of the sensor decreased by approximately 30 dB at 625 kHz, effective power of the ultrasonic closing click was confirmed at this frequency. Moreover, it was shown that, surprisingly, the signal power at 625 kHz was still at the same level as that at around 100 kHz. Those wide bandwidth signal components exist independent of the type of mechanical valve, but the spectral pattern shows some dependence on the valve type.

A Multi-Agent Learning Language (MALL) is defined as being necessary for agents in environments where they encounter crucial situations in which they have to learn about the environment, other parties moves and strategies, and then construct an optimal plan. The language is based on two major factors, the level of certainty in fully monitoring (surveying) the agents and the environment, and optimal plan construction, in an autonomous way. Most of the work related to software agents is based on the assumption that other agents are trustworthy. In the growing Internet environment this may not be true. The proposed new learning language allows agents to learn about the environment and the strategies of their opponents while devising their own plans. The language is being tested in our project of software agents for Electronic Commerce that operates in various security zones. The language is flexible and adaptable to a variety of agents applications.

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.

Voice activity detection (VAD) is to determine whether a short time speech frame is voice or silence. VAD is useful in reducing the mean speech coding rate by suppressing transmission during silence periods, and is effective in transmitting speech and other data simultaneously. This letter describes a VAD system that uses a neural network. The neural network gets several parameters by analyzing slices of the speech wave form, and outputs only one scalar value related to voice activity. This output is compared to a threshold to determine whether the slice is voice or silence. The mean code transfer rate can be reduced to less than 50% by using the proposed VAD system.

This paper proposes a novel signal transmission scheme for helicopter satellite communications. The proposed scheme is based on time diversity, and combined with a novel algorithm to suppress an influence of carrier phase slip. In the proposed scheme, carrier phase slip is detected in cross correlation processing of the received signal, and is effectively suppressed. The proposed scheme thus makes it possible to employ coherent phase shift keying modulation to achieve bit error rate performance superior to that of differential phase shift keying modulation even in the low carrier-to-noise power ratio environment.

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.

As the current Internet becomes popular in information access, demands for real-time display and playback of continuous media are ever increasing. The applications include real-time audio/video clips embedded in WWW, electronic commerce, and video-on-demand. In this paper, we present a new control protocol R3CP for real-time applications that transmit stored MPEG video stream over a lossy and best-effort based network environment like the Internet. Several control mechanisms are used: a) packet framing based on the meta data; b) adaptive queue-length based rate control scheme; c) data preloading; and d) look-ahead pre-retransmission for lost packet recovery. Different from many adaptive rate control schemes proposed in the past, the proposed flow control is to ensure continuous, periodic playback of video frames by keeping the receiver buffer queue length at a target value to minimize the probability that player finds an empty buffer. Contrary to the widespread belief that "Retransmission of lost packets is unnecessary for real-time applications," we show the effective use of combining look-ahead pre-retransmission control with proper data preloading and adaptive rate control scheme to improve the real-time playback performance. The performance of the proposed protocol is studied via simulation using actual video traces and actual delay traces collected from the Internet. The simulation results show that R3CP can significantly improve frame playback performance especially for transmission paths with poor packet delivery condition.

In the ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems), it is an essential condition (mixed environment) that vehicles that have communication equipment and vehicles that do not have it simultaneously run in the same road. In this paper, a vehicular driving assistant system that is applicable to the mixed environment is proposed. The proposed system uses spread spectrum techniques and consists of several new systems such as a PN code assignment system, new vehicle position systems, and a vehicle map update system. In the proposed system, the wireless broadcast CDMA is used for inter-vehicle communications. This paper also shows preexaminations of the proposed system by using an autonomous traffic flow simulator including inter-vehicle communications. It is shown that the traffic safety can be improved by using inter-vehicle communications.

This letter proposes a new retransmission control scheme for slow-frequency-hopped communication systems, in which the number of (re)transmitted packets is adaptively decreased in a certain period. Performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed and compared with that of the conventional scheme in terms of the normalized throughput and the 98% packet transmission delay. The numerical results show the superiority of the proposed scheme.

M-ary/SS systems are compared with DS/SS systems applied the multicarrier systems and the RAKE receiver in the presence of AWGN, frequency selective Rayleigh fading and partial-band interference. In particular, the BER performance and SSMA capability are evaluated. Consequently, the M-ary/SSMA system using the multicarrier techniques is subject to the M-ary/SSMA system with the RAKE receiver in the presence of partial-band interference. The BER performance of the M-ary/SSMA system is better than that of the DS/SSMA system when the number of users is smaller than 20. And the spectral efficiency of the multicarrier M-ary/SSMA system is best in the four systems when JSR=20 [dB] and BER=10-3.

Array redistribution is required very often in programs on distributed memory parallel computers. It is essential to use efficient algorithms for redistribution, otherwise the performance of programs may degrade considerably. In this paper, we focus on automatic generation of communication routines for multi-dimensional redistribution. The principal advantage of this work is to gain the ability to handle redistribution between arbitrary source and destination processor sets and between arbitrary source and destination distribution schemes. We have implemented these algorithms using Parallelware communication library. Some experimental results show the efficiency and flexibility of our techniques compared to the other redistribution works.

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.

This paper investigates the problem of communication errors in distributed shared memory (DSM) systems. Communication errors can introduce two critical problems: damage and loss. The damage problem makes the transmitted data destroyed and then produces incorrect computational results. The loss problem causes the transmitted data lost during transmission and then not received. However, the loss problem can be easily resolved using acknowledgement. Therefore, we focus on how to efficiently handle the damage problem. In DSM systems, the size of data transferred between nodes is larger than the size actually shared between nodes. That is, when a processing node receives data, not all the data items in this received data will be used. Based on this property, we present a new technique to resolve the data damage problem in DSM systems. This technique allows a processing node to continue computation without being blocked to wait for the correct data when it receives damaged data. Therefore, the latency for handling the data damage can be hidden. However, there is an optimistic assumption made in the proposed technique. If this optimistic assumption is not valid, the latency will not be hidden. To show the advantage and the overhead of the proposed technique, we perform extensive trace-driven simulations. The simulation results show that at least 62% of the latency for handling data damage can be hidden.

In this paper, the bit error rate (BER) performance of the Spread Spectrum communication with Constrained Spreading Code system is studied under the synchronous CDMA system. Particularly, BER considering the tracking error is derived by theoretical analysis. The synchronizing spreading sequence is employed to track the signals in the receiver. As the result, the BER performance is degraded by increasing the number of users. However, the BER performance can be improved by canceling the co-channel interference and by suppressing the cross-correlation value between the information spreading sequence and the synchronizing spreading sequence.

This paper describes code assignment and the multicode sense scheme for an inter-vehicle CDMA communication network. When considering an inter-vehicle broadcasting CDMA communication network, spreading code assignment and notification problems arise. In such a CDMA network, the use of common codes is a solution. Then an objective function of common code assignment in an IVCN is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. In addition, a multicode sense (MCS)/CDMA system is proposed as a simple code assignment scheme. Computer simulations show that the MCS/CDMA system can autonomously perform spatial rearrangement of the common codes using only local information that each vehicle can obtain by sensing the code channels.