Coding scheme is discussed for M-Choose-T communication in which at most T active users out of M potential users simultaneously transmit their messages over a common channel. The multiple-access channel considered in this paper is assumed to be a time-discrete noiseless adder channel without feedback with T binary inputs and one real-valued output, and is used on the assumption of perfect block and bit synchronization among users. In this paper a new class of uniquely decodable codes is proposed in order to realize error-free M-Choose-T communication over the adder channel described above. These codes are uniquely decodable in the sense that not only the set of active users can be specified but also their transmitted messages can be recovered uniquely as long as T or fewer users are active simultaneously. It is shown that these codes have a simple decoding algorithm and can achieve a very high sum rate arbitrarily close to unity if exactly T users are active.

This paper proposes a multi-fisheye distortion method which can show a large-scale telecommunication network in a single window on the display of a workstation or personal computer. This distortion method has three advantages over the conventional single-fisheye distortion method. First, the focus area is magnified smoothly by the fisheye distortion method, and the peripheral area coordinates are calculated linearly to avoid unnecessary distortion. Second, multiple focus areas are magnified smoothly by using an average of the coordinates calculated for the individual focuses. Third, the scale of unnecessary areas is reduced to provide sufficient space for magnification. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by applying to the display of large-scale networks. The effect of the resulting network map distortion on the user is tested by a subjective evaluation experiment.

Telecommunications management is essentially an aggregation of a wide range of activities, including operations and management (O & M) of telecommunications services and customers as well as the network and network elements. During the period of rapid growth in telecommunications, the highest priority was to meet increasing market demand and to construct a telecommunications network infrastructure. Therefore, research and development in telecommunications management were subordinated to the evolution of telecommunications services and systems. Recently, customers have been demanding higher quality services, as a variety of new, advanced services have been introduced. This has led to the need to integrate telecommunications services and O & M services. This paper first reviews the history of the development of telecommunications O & M in parallel with the progress of telecommunications in Japan and clarifies specific features in each step of this progress. This analysis identifies urgent problems and their solutions. The results suggests that telecommunications O & M and O & M services should be considered as a key to making future services possible and to the value of those services in a multi-media telecommunications services environment. Based on these studies, the future direction of O & M is then shown, focusing on cooperative O & M involving the customer in the multi-media, multidomain telecommunications environment.

OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) is a useful digital modulation method for terrestrial digital broadcasting systems, both for digital TV broadcasting and digital audio broadcasting. OFDM is a kind of multicarrier modulation and shows excellent performance especially in multipath environments and in mobile reception. Other advantages are its resistance to interference signals and its suitability for digital signal processing. When each carrier of the OFDM signal is modulated with DQPSK, we call it DQPSK-OFDM. DQPSK-OFDM is a basic OFDM system, which is especially suitable for mobile reception. This paper describes how a DQPSK-OFDM system works and shows several experimental and simulation results. The experimental results mainly concern the performance of the DQPSK-OFDM system relative to various disturbances such as multipath (ghost) signals, nonlinearity of the channel, and interference from analog signals. The transmission characteristics of DQPSK-OFDM are investigated and the basic criteria for the system design of DQPSK-OFDM are discussed.

The Hyper Hospital" is a novel medical care system which will be constructed on an electronic information network. The human interface of the Hyper Hospital based on the modern virtual reality technology is expected to enhance patients' ability to heal by providing computer-supported on-line visual consultations. In order to investigate the effects and features of on-line visual consultations in the Hyper Hospital, we conducted an experiment to clarify the influence of electronic interviews on the talking behavior of interviewees in the context of simulated doctor-patient interactions. Four types of distant-confrontation interviews were made with voluntary subjects and their verbal and non-verbal responses were analyzed from the behavioral point of view. The types of interviews included three types of electronic media-mediated interviews and one of a live face to face interview. There was a tendency in the media-mediated interviews that both the latency and the duration of interviewees' utterances in answering questions increased when they were compared with those of live face to face interviews. These results suggest that the interviewee became more verbose or talkative in the media-mediated interviews than in the live interviews. However, the interviewee's psychological tension was generally augmented in the media-mediated interviews, which was suggested by the delay of the initiation of conversations as compared to the conventional face-to-face interviews. We also discuss the applicability of media-mediated interviews by an electronic doctor which we are studying as a functional unit of our Hyper Hospital, a network based virtual reality space for medical care.

This paper compares three typical system-sharing configurations for FTTH networks that provide narrowband and video distribution services and proposes a remote node locating strategy for each configuration. Two new evaluation factors, required land space and service provisioning effort, are included in the calculation, in addition to facility cost and maintenance effort. By considering these factors together, the total network cost is calculated and the sensitivity to the number of remote nodes is evaluated. Finally, the most economical system-sharing configuration is identified on the basis of the evaluations for two typical service areas in Japan, for both present and future cost environments.

A programmable clock generator, based on a phase-locked loop (PLL) circuit, has been developed with 0.5 µm CMOS triple-layer Al interconnection technology for use as an on-chip clock generator in a 300-MHz video signal processor. The PLL-based clock generator generates a clock signal whose frequency ranges from 50 to 350 MHz which is an integral multiple, from 2 to 16, of an external clock frequency. In order to achieve stable operation within this wide range, a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) with selectable low VCO gain characteristics has been developed. Experimental results show that the clock generator generates a 297-MHz clock with a 27-MHz external clock, with jitter of 180 ps and power dissipation of 120 mW at 3.3-V power supply, and it can also oscillate up to 348 MHz with a 31.7-MHz external clock.

This paper presents the results of a study made to determine the line length coverage of the high-bit-rate digital subscriber line (HDSL) present in NTT's local networks. The HDSL carries one bi-directional 784 kbit/s channel per pair and supports the digital interface at 1544kbit/s by using two cable pairs. The primary purpose of this study is to estimate the range limits for candidate transmission schemes considering line installation conditions, and to determine the most promising transmission scheme and its feasibility given the environment of NTT's local networks. Pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transmission schemes are compared for HDSL implementation. It is shown that 2B1Q-PAM and 16-QAM generally achieve better performance than the more complicated PAM and QAM given the presence intra-system crosstalk interference (interference between identical transmission systems). The range limits determined by inter-system crosstalk interference (interference between different transmission systems) with basic rate access (BRA) implementing a burst-mode transmission method are also estimated. This paper concludes that 2B1Q-PAM achieves the best overall performance in NTT's local networks. A feasibility study of 192-6144 kbit/s transmission is also described.

Mixed-signal LSIs promise to permit increased levels of integration, not only in voiceband but also in multi-GHz-band applications such as wireless communications and optical data links. This paper reviews the evolution of mixed-signal communications LSIs and discusses some of their design problems, including device noise and crosstalk noise. In the low-power and low-voltage designs emerging as new disciplines, the target supply voltage for voiceband LSIs is around 1 V, and even GHz-band circuits are approaching 2 V. MOS devices are expected to play an important role even in the frequency range over 100 MHz, in the area of wireless or optical communications circuits.

An Ultra-high-speed (higher than 60 MHz) Viterbi decoder VLSIC with coding rates from one-half to fifteen-sixteenth and a constraint length of seven for forward error correction (FEC) has been developed using 0.8-µm semicustom CMOS LSIC technology and a newly developed high-speed ACS circuit. To reduce power consumption of the one-chip Viterbi decoder, a universal-coding-rate scarce-state-transition (SST) Viterbi decoding scheme and low-power-consumption burst-mode-selection (BMS) path memory have been proposed and employed to the developed VLSIC. In addition, a new maximum-likelihood-decision (MLD) circuit for the SST Viterbi decoder has been developed. The total power consumption of the developed chip is reduced to 75% of the conventional one and the developed Viterbi decodar VLSIC achieves a maximum operation speed of 60 MHz. It achieves near theoretical net coding-gain performance for various coding rates.

A simple solution for the right-angle H-plane waveguide double bend is obtained in analytic series form. The simultaneous equations are solved to obtain the transmission and reflection coefficients in fast convergent series forms. The numerical computations are performed to show the behaviors of the transmission coefficient versus frequency.

In this paper, chaos synchronization in coupled discrete-time dynamical systems is studied. Computer results display the interesting synchronization behaviors in the mutually coupled systems. As possible applications of chaos synchronization, parameter estimations and secure communications are proposed. Furthermore, a modified OGY method is given, which converts a chaotic motion into a periodic motion.

Error-correction techniques can be used to reduce the required carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N) in digital satellite news gathering (SNG) systems. The required e.i.r.p. of a digital SNG terminal is smaller than that of conventional analog SNG RF terminals. In this paper, a Ku-band portable SNG RF terminal using a flat antenna is proposed to make the best use of these digital systems. This portable terminal uses 16 planar microstrip subarray antennas, each with a solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) mounted on its backside. The proposed RF terminal is distinctly different from a conventional RF terminal with a parabolic antenna in two ways; it is portable and it has electronic tracking capability. Electronic antenna tracking reduces the terminal setup time because precise alignment of the antenna with the satellite is not required. This paper first describes the system concept and discusses the design concept. Secondly, it then explains phase shifters and feedback loops for electronic tracking. The tracking performance of a feedback system using four subarrays is also presented with some comparisons between theoretical and measured results. Experimental results for the low side-lobe flat antenna and the SSPAs are then presented. These are the most important components of the system. The flat antenna meets the design objectives specified by ITU-R Recommendations. By orthogonally exciting the rectangular patch antenna, the flat antenna is capable of operating dual polarizations and dual frequencies (transmit/vertical polarization: 14GHz; receive/horizontal polarization: 12GHz). The SSPAs have an efficiency of 21% and an output power of 5W.

Long term phase noises are characterized for network synchronization using two time domain measurement techniques: the Maximum Time Interval Error (MTIE) and Time Variance (TVAR). First, the characteristics of previously measured fiber delay variations are evaluated. The diurnal and annual delay variations and the long term noise feature of random walk phase modulation are well represented by the TVAR technique. The delay variation due to the AU pointer operation is then measured using commercial SDH demultiplexing equipment and compared with the simulation result; the simulation result agrees well with the experimental result. The delay variation in the SDH equipment is simulated using the thermal fiber delay variation measured in the actual network as the input phase of the equipment. It is shown that the SDH equipment sometimes generates delay steps of 617ns, which are larger than the normal pointer operations of 154ns. The long term delay variation, periods over 107s, due to the threshold spacing between the positive and negative stuffing is described. We also show that TVAR is suitable for evaluating the phase noise feature and MTIE can clearly show the peak value of phase noise. The long term phase noises evaluated in this paper are the dominant sources that degrade network synchronous performance. The results of this paper will be useful in designing the equipment synchronous specification.

In real life, our sence of social reality is supported by the institutional basis, group/interpersonal basis, and belief/schema basis. In networked life, in contrast, these natural and ordinary bases are not always warranted because of a lack of institutional backup, the fragility of the group or interpersonal environment, and the noncommonality of our common sense. In order to compensate for these incomplete bases, networkers ar seeking adaptive communication styles. In this process, there emerge three types of communication cultures. One is the name-card exchange" type. This type is realized by communicating our demographic attributes verbally, which is useful for reality construction of the institutional basis. The second is the ideographization" type. In this type, the content of customary nonverbal communication is creatively transformed into various pseudo nonverbal or para-linguistic expressions, which strengthen fragile interpersonal relationships. The last type is the verbalian" type. This type never depends on the interpersonal or institutional basis. The networked reality is constructed solely in the attempt for common sense development among members. By analyzing the content of messages exchanged in four public groups called Forums," the author found that patterns of communication are transformed in a manner adaptive to each Forum's reality. Thier adaptation modes are different and depend on the types of communication culture every Forum pursues. This is contrarty to the psychologists' tendency to assume that there must be common characteristics or rules valid throughout all of the electronic communication situations.

The many-user networked virtual world system InterSpace" is described. This system's main purpose is to enhance the user's communication activities. In InterSpace, the real world information is embedded in the shared virtual world as a combination of video and CG images. Users can ovserve and access this information by simply looking and approaching embedded images. The concept of InterSpace and a prototype system of this service are introduced.

When we design a human interface of a computer-mediated communication (CMC) system, it is important to take a socio-behavioral approach for understanding the nature of the human communication. From this point of view, we conducted experimental observations and post-experimental questionnaires to investigate communicative characteristics in a teleconference using Fujitsu Habitat" visual telecommunication software. We experimentally held the following three kinds of small-group conferences consisting of five geographically distributed participants: (a) teleconference using a visual telecommunication system (Fujitsu Habitat"), (b) teleconference using a real-time keyboard telecommunication system of NIFTY-Serve and (c) live face to face physical conference. Analyses were made on (1) effects of the media on utterance behaviors of conference members, and (2) satisfaction of conference members with communicative functions of the media. Satisfaction was measured by a seven-level rating scale. We found that participants in a telconference held by using Habitat showed significant differences in contents of utterances and the rating of satisfaction with nine communicative functions compared with those of conferences held by using a real-time keyboard telecommunication system and a live face-to-face conference. These results suggest some features that could facilitate multi-participant on-line electronic conferences and conversations.

Customers' requirements for telecommunications services have been changing from simple point-to-point and single-medium communications to multiple-point and multiple-media, as well as changes in bandwidth requirements. In addition, customers' end stations (ES) will not be homogeneous, from POTS-like terminal to sophisticated multimedia workstation that handles various kind of media. This paper discusses communications management architectures that provide multimedia multipoint communications in a heterogeneous ESs environment. It summarizes existing communications management architectures, and discusses advanced architectures that provide multimedia communications, multipoint communications and heterogeneity handling capabilities in a flexible and efficient manner. The objectives of this architecture are to integrate multimedia multipoint communications capabilities into the network, and provide customers with versatile communications service request interface which can handle from plain single-medium point-to-point communications to multimedia multipoint communications. This paper especially focuses on the management functionalities for multimedia multipoint service fabrics (MMSF) which may be owned by the network provider, the third-party service provider, or the customer. It discusses variations of MMSF management protocol implementations in the case that the MMSF is owned by either of the three. It also discusses implementation of customers' various operations requests to the MMSF in the communication phase.

Precise measurements of temperature dependence of the Andreev reflection current for the N–I–S junctions were carried out. Au and Pb were used as N (normal metal) and S (superconducting material), respectively. The experimental results agreed with the analyses based on the Arnold theory.

We investigate chaotic dynamics due to the homoclinic points observed from a widely used phase–locked loops operating as a frequency–modulated demodulator. Our purpose is to obtain parameter region of the homoclinic points using Melnikov method in a periodically-forced second–order nonlinear nonautonomous equation representing phase–locked loops. If the PLL equation has large damping (actually, this is the case of standard PLL), the unperturbed system becomes non–Hamiltonian. Therefore, one cannot obtain the saddle loop analytically in general, and hence it is very difficult to apply Melnikov method to such a system. Since the current PLL used in practice has a triangular phase detector (i.e., a periodic triangular shaped function) as its nonlinearity, we can use piecewise–linear method, and thus we are succeeded in deriving both the saddle loop and the Melnikov integral analytically even in the PLL equation with practical large damping. We have obtained many boundary curves for homoclinic tangency for a wide range of damping coefficients and modulation frequency. In particular, we treat the general case of β2ζ in this paper where β denotes the normalized natural frequency and ζ denotes the damping coefficient. We compare this results with our previous totally numerical results and have found that this method gives more accurate boundary curves than our previous method.