The miniaturization of electronic devices is leading to the creation of body-centric wireless communications, in which wireless devices are attached to human body. However, the human body environment is often uninviting for wireless signals owing to the mutual influence between the human body and wireless devices' antennas, namely wearable antennas. Therefore, wearable antennas need to be carefully designed. In this paper, a small wearable antenna with folded ground at 2.4 GHz is proposed. The folded ground has two effects: one is to improve efficiency and the other is to enhance bandwidth. When the antenna is very close to human body, it has an efficiency of 50.7% and a wide operation bandwidth of 130 MHz.

An electronic ticket is a contract, in digital format, between the user and the service provider, and reduces both economic costs and time in many services such as air travel industries or public transport. However, the security of the electronic ticket has to be strongly guaranteed, as well as the privacy of their users. We present an electronic ticketing system that considers these security requirements and includes the exculpability as a security requirement for these systems, i.e. users and the service provider can not falsely accuse each other of misbehavior. The system ensures that either both parties receive their desired data from other or neither does (fair exchange). Another interesting property is reusability. Thanks to reusability the tickets can be used a predefined number of times with the same security as single tickets. Furthermore, this scheme takes special care of the computational requirements on the users side by using light-weight cryptography. We show that the scheme is usable in practice by means of its implementation using mobile phones with Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities.

Thin film glucose biosensors were fabricated with organic/inorganic hybrid films based on glucose oxidase (GOx) and Prussian Blue nano-clusters. The biosensors composed of hybrid films were characterized by the low operating potential and the advantage to interference-free detection. In this research, we employed two kinds of thin films for GOx immobilization: Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) and self-assembled monolayer (SAM). The LB film immobilizes GOx in its inside through the electrostatic force, while the SAM immobilizes GOx with the covalent bond. The sensors with LB film produced a relatively high current signal, while the non-linear behavior and a low stability were recognized. On the other hand, the sensors with SAM presented a good linear relationship and a very stable performance.

In this review, we introduce a variety of surface sensitive techniques for the study of organic thin films, and applications to organic devices. These studies include surface plasmon emission light, organic thin film transistors, combination of quartz crystal microbalance and optical waveguide spectroscopy, evaluation of alignment of liquid crystal molecules at surfaces, and biosensor applications.

A combination of single-carrier frequency-division mult-iple-access (SC-FDMA) and relay transmission is effective for performance improvement in uplink transmission. In SC-FDMA, a mapping strategy of user's spectrum has an enormous impact on system performance. In the relay communication, the optimum mapping strategy may differentiate from that in direct communication because of the independently distributed channels among nodes. In this letter, how each link should be considered in subcarrier mapping is studied and the impact of mapping strategies on the average bit error rate (BER) performance of single-user SC-FDMA relay communications will be given.

Current density-voltage (J-V) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) characteristics of P3HT/n--silicon heterojunction diodes were investigated to clarify the carrier conduction mechanism at the organic/inorganic heterojunction. The J-V characteristics of the P3HT/n--Si junctions can be explained by a Schottky diode model with an interfacial layer. Diode parameters such as Schottky barrier height and ideality factor were estimated to be 0.78 eV and 3.2, respectively. The C-V analysis suggests that the depletion layer appears in the n--Si layer with a thickness of 1.2 µm from the junction with zero bias and the diffusion potential was estimated at 0.40 eV at the open-circuit condition. The present heterojunction allows a photovoltaic operation with power conversion efficiencies up to 0.38% with a simulated solar light exposure of 100 mW/cm2. The forward bias current was enhanced by coating the Si surface with a SiC layer, where the ideality factor was improved to be the level of 1.451.50.

We fabricated solution-processed organic complementary inverters based on α,ω-bis(2-hexyldecyl)sexithiophene (BHD6T) for p-channel and C60-fused N-methylpyrrolidine-meta-dodecyl phenyl (C60MC12) for n-channel. The BHD6T and C60MC12 thin-film transistors showed high field-effect mobilities of 0.035 and 0.057 cm2/Vs, respectively. The complementary inverter with a supply voltage of 50 V exhibited inverting voltages of 26.8 V for forward and 27.0 V for backward sweeps and a high gain of 76.

In this paper, we propose an approach to obtaining enhanced performance of the Linpack benchmark on a GPU-accelerated PC cluster connected via relatively slow inter-node connections. For one node with a quad-core Intel Xeon W3520 processor and a NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU card, we implement a CPU–GPU parallel double-precision general matrix–matrix multiplication (dgemm) operation, and achieve a performance improvement of 34% compared with the GPU-only case and 64% compared with the CPU-only case. For an entire 16-node cluster, each node of which is the same as the above and is connected with two gigabit Ethernet links, we use a computation-communication overlap scheme with GPU acceleration for the Linpack benchmark, and achieve a performance improvement of 28% compared with the GPU-accelerated high-performance Linpack benchmark (HPL) without overlapping. Our overlap GPU acceleration solution uses overlaps in which the main inter-node communication and data transfer to the GPU device memory are overlapped with the main computation task on the CPU cores. These overlaps use multi-core processors, which almost all of today's high-performance computers use. In particular, as well as using a CPU core for communication tasks, we also simultaneously use other CPU cores and the GPU for computation tasks. In order to enable overlap between inter-node communication and computation tasks, we eliminate their close dependence by breaking the main computation task into smaller tasks and rescheduling. Based on a scheme in which part of the CPU computation power is simultaneously used for tasks other than computation tasks, we experimentally find the optimal computation ratio for CPUs; this ratio differs from the case of parallel dgemm operation of one node.

The cooperative relay network exploits the space diversity gain by allowing cooperation among users to improve transmission quality. It is an important issue to identify the cluster-head (or relay node) and its members who are to cooperate. The cluster-head consumes more battery power than an ordinary node since it has extra responsibilities, i.e., ensuring the cooperation of its members' transmissions; thereby the cluster-head has a lower throughput than the average. Since users are joining or departing the clusters from time to time, the network topology is changing and the network may not be stable. How to balance the fairness among users and the network stability is a very interesting topic. This paper proposes an adaptive weighted clustering algorithm (AWCA), in which the weight factors are introduced to adaptively control both the stability and fairness according to the number of arrival users. It is shown that when the number of arrival users is large, AWCA has the life time longer than FWCA and similar to SWCA and that when the number of arrival users is small, AWCA provides fairness higher than SWCA and close to FWCA.

The message passing interface (MPI) broadcast communication commonly causes a severe performance bottleneck in multicore system that uses distributed memory. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm and hardware structure for the MPI broadcast communication to reduce the bottleneck situation. The transmission order is set based on the state of each processing node that comprises the multicore system, so the novel algorithm minimizes the performance degradation caused by conflict. The proposed scoreboard MPI unit is evaluated by modeling it with SystemC and implemented using VerilogHDL. The size of the proposed scoreboard MPI unit occupies less than 1.03% of the whole chip, and it yields a highly improved performance up to 75.48% as its maximum with 16 processing nodes. Hence, with respect to low-cost design and scalability, this scoreboard MPI unit is particularly useful towards increasing overall performance of the embedded MPSoC.

For the control of multiple servomotors in a humanoid robots, a communication system is proposed. In the system, DC electric power, command/response signals and a common clock signal for precise synchronous movement of the servomotors are transmitted via the same wiring with a multi-drop bus. Because of the bandwidth limitation, the common clock signal and the command/response signals overlap each other. It is confirmed that the coexistence of both signals is possible by using interference cancellation at the reception of command/response signals.

We designed and synthesized alkoxyphenyl group containing starburst host materials 1. Using 1 as a host material, efficient phosphorescent OLEDs with the power efficiencies of 32 lm W-1 for blue, and 85 lm W-1 for green at 100 cd m-2 were developed.

It is well known that an nth-order real polynomial D(z)= is Schur stable if its coefficients satisfy the monotonic condition, i.e., dn > dn-1 > > d1 > d0 > 0. In this letter it is shown that even if the monotonic condition is violated by one coefficient (say dk), D(z) is still Schur stable if the deviation of dk from dk+1 or dk-1 is not too large. More precisely we derive upper bounds for the admissible deviations of dk from dk+1 or dk-1 to ensure the Schur stability of D(z). It is also shown that the results obtained in this letter always yield the larger stability range for dk than an existing result.

To realize a single or several molecule device, the following are necessary: (1) an electrical wiring method that is not destructive to the molecular aggregates and does not affect the electronic state of the molecules, (2) noncontact and controllable molecular manipulation technology, (3) oriented growth techniques especially to prepare a nanodevice employing an anisotropic molecular system. In this paper, recently developed electric-field assisted growth and its application to molecular device fabrication are presented.

A finite buffer shared by multiple packet queues is considered. Partitioning the buffer to maximize total throughput is formulated as a resource allocation problem, the solution is shown to be achieved by a greedy incremental algorithm in polynomial time. The optimal buffer allocation strategy is applied to different models for a wireless downlink. First, a set of parallel M/M/1/mi queues, corresponding to a downlink with orthogonal channels is considered. It is verified that at high load, optimal buffer partitioning can boost the throughput significantly with respect to complete sharing of the buffer. Next, the problem of optimal combined buffer allocation and channel assignment problems are shown to be separable in an outage scenario. Motivated by this observation, buffer allocation is considered in a system where users need to be multiplexed and scheduled based on channel state. It is observed that under finite buffers in the high load regime, scheduling simply with respect to channel state with a simply partitioned buffer achieves comparable throughput to combined channel and queue-aware scheduling.

In this paper, we consider multiple source and destination antennas based on relay selection scheme to improve the end-to-end outage performance for decode-and-forward cooperative networks. We derive an exact closed-form expression of the outage probability for the proposed system over a Rayleigh fading channel and describe the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff of the system. We then analyze the effects of the number of source and destination antennas on the outage probabilities and diversity-multiplexing tradeoffs.

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) allows devices automatic discovery and control of services available in those devices connected to a Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) network. Although many products are designed using UPnP, little attention has been given to UPnP related to modeling and performance analysis. This paper uses a framework of Generalized Stochastic Petri Net (GSPN) to model and analyze the behavior of UPnP systems. The framework includes modeling UPnP, reachability decomposition, GSPN analysis, and reward assignment. Then, the Platform Independent Petri net Editor 2 (PIPE2) tool is used to model and evaluate the controllers in terms of power consumption, system utilization and network throughput. Through quantitative analysis, the steady states in the operation and notification stage dominate the system performance, and the control point is better than the device in power consumption but the device outperforms the control point in evaluating utilization. The framework and numerical results are useful to improve the quality of services provided in UPnP devices.

Solution-based organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) with low parasitic capacitance have been fabricated using a self-aligned method. The self-aligned processes using a cross-linking polymer gate insulator allow fabricating electrically stable polymer OFETs with small overlap area between the source-drain electrodes and the gate electrode, whose frequency characteristics have been investigated by impedance spectroscopy (IS). The IS of polymer OFETs with self-aligned electrodes reveals frequency-dependent channel formation process and the frequency response in FET structure.

Adaptive interference suppression strategies based on the transform domain approach are proposed for a satellite on-board filter bank under tone-type interferences. In the proposed methods, the three kinds of algorithms to compute the threshold level are jointly employed with the notch filter or the clipper. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes significantly improve performance under interfering environments, compared to the no suppression case.

In cellular systems, particular in the cell edge, the user terminals (UTs) are suffered from the attenuation of the signal from their target base station (BS) and the relatively strong interferences from BSs of other users. This paper investigates the performance improvement under this bad situation by BS cooperation (BSC) in the downlink scenario using multiantenna transmission assuming the perfect channel state information (CSI), and compares the effectiveness of several strategies based on a three cell model. Through computer simulations, the performance improvement by BSC is verified. Then the result is extended to multiple stream transmission utilizing the feature of multiantenna, and advantage of BSC with data sharing is shown.