In direct communication, terminals that are close to each other can communicate directly without traffic going through centralized controller such as a base station (BS). This brings several advantages. We study direct communication with localized distribution, so that users tend to gather around some areas (clusters/hot-spots) within the cell such as buildings. Previous analysis about clustering has focused on one dimensional scenarios. Here we present theoretical analysis of direct communication with two dimensional clustering. Additional analysis is presented for direct communication with correlated clusters. With correlated clusters some pairs of source and destination clusters are more probable than other pairs. According to our best knowledge, this is the first time that theoretical analysis is presented about clustering and correlated clusters in two dimensional scenarios. Simulations confirm the validity of the analysis. In addition to the exact results, we also suggest using the point-based approximation to rapidly and easily obtain results. The numerical results show that the gains from direct communication, in terms of blocking probability and carried traffic, depend on the offered traffic. Additionally, correlation in cluster selection is shown to significantly improve performance. Point-based approximation is shown to be very useful when the number of clusters is large.

A signal detection system using noise statistical processing is proposed. By approaching the problems of low voltage and high noise from miniaturization of a device from a stochastic point of view, a faint-signal receiving system that can effectively detect subthreshold and noise level signals has been developed. In addition, an alternative to statistical processing is proposed, and would be successfully implemented on a circuit. For the proposed signal detection method, the detection sensitivity was investigated using numerical simulation, and the detection sensitivity was sufficiently high to detect even a signal with a signal-to-inherent-noise ratio of -14 dB. Thus, it is anticipated that the application of this system to an integrated circuit will have a significant impact on signal processing.

A time synchronization protocol for WSN is required to compensate time discrepancy. Time discrepancy among sensor nodes inevitably happens in WSN due to several internal and external factors. In order to make WSN's own job done effectively, a time synchronization protocol should be designed to achieve low execution time and low network traffic as well as accurate synchronization. Several synchronization protocols have been proposed to provide accurate time synchronization but do not consider execution time and network traffic for time synchronization. This paper proposes MNTP; it provides rapid and accurate time synchronization in multi-hop communication range. It presents a new broadcast scheme and time stamping mechanism to achieve low execution time and low network traffic along with accurate synchronization. Evaluation results show that MNTP improves synchronization accuracy up to 22% in single-hop and 51% in multi-hop respectively. MNTP also has 67 times and 58 times lower execution time and network traffic when 300 nodes are deployed in 2020 m2 sensor field.

A new in vitro experimental tool was developed to study the mechanism of the ultrasonic closing clicks' genesis of mechanical heart valves. Since the newly developed tester adopted compressed air flow directly instead of the blood analog fluid to drive the mechanical heart valve, it is not possibe to generate any cavitation. Closing clicks were measured with a small accelerometer at the surface of the valve holder made of silicone rubber. Ultrasonic closing clicks as well as audible closing clicks, similar to those measured clinically, could be observed using this setup. Thus, it was confirmed that the ultrasonic closing clicks can be generated without the existence of cavitation. Simultaneous measurements of the valve motion were made with a high-speed video camera, and the analysis of the video frames and clicks showed that higher frequency signal components of more than 50 kHz could be generated only at the instant of the closure, which means the collision of the occluder with the housing. Eighteen miniature accelerometers with an area of one square millimeter were developed and stuck on the housing to monitor the distribution of the housing vibrations in detail, and it was found that the vibrations correspond to the ultrasonic closing clicks propagated from the valve stop: the collision point of the occluder with the housing. This fact indicated that the generation of ultrasonic closing clicks are limited to the small area of the collision. From those results, it was concluded that the major origin of the ultrasonic closing clicks' genesis should be the collision of the occluder with the housing.

A fast and accurate method for Generalized Harmonic Analysis is proposed. The proposed method estimates the parameters of a sinusoid and subtracts it from a target signal one by one. The frequency of the sinusoid is estimated around a peak of Fourier spectrum using binary search. The binary search can control the trade-off between the frequency accuracy and the computation time. The amplitude and the phase are estimated to minimize the squared sum of the residue after extraction of estimated sinusoids from the target signal. Sinusoid parameters are recalculated to reduce errors introduced by the peak detection using windowed Discrete-Time Fourier Transform. Audio signals are analyzed by the proposed method, which confirms the accuracy compared to existing methods. The proposed algorithm has high degree of concurrency and is suitable to be implemented on Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). The computational throughput can be made higher than the input audio signal rate.

Transmission delay in audio communications is a well-known obstacle to achieving smooth communication. However, it is not known what kinds of effects are caused by small delays. We hypothesized that the small delay in the listener's responses disturbs the speaker's "verbal conditioning," where the verbal behavior of the speaker varies in accordance with the listener's responses. We examined whether the small delays in the listener's responses disturb the speaker's verbal conditioning using an artificial-grammar learning task. The results suggested that a 300-ms delay disturbed the participants' verbal conditioning although they were not adequately aware of the delay.

The authors propose a user-centric seamless handover (HO) scheme, which is a kind of a vertical HO from a new perspective, toward a next generation network where heterogeneous access networks converge. The users' experience-oriented scheme allows users to enjoy the optimal service quality for real-time applications in respective access networks. In addition, the scheme sustains on-going sessions during the vertical HO. The proposed scheme consists of two methods -- the bicasting of Different Quality-level Streams (DiffQS) and the Delay Difference Absorption (DDA) method. Initially, the authors propose two plausible methods for the SIP-based bicasting of DiffQS. This document introduces a SIP-capable network element named the HO Assistive Server (HOAS). HOAS controls bicasting of DiffQS and provides users with the optimal service quality for real-time applications via respective access networks as well as avoiding packet loss during HO. The DDA method is also proposed to prevent a service interruption and smoothly continue a real-time service during HO. Evaluation results show that the scheme achieves the seamless service continuity from the users' perspective for HO between cellular and high-speed wireless access via the implementation of a prototype system.

Communication-free Petri nets provide a net semantics for Basic Parallel Processes, which form a subclass of Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) a process calculus for the description and algebraic manipulation of concurrent communicating systems. It is known that the reachability problem for communication-free Petri nets is NP-complete. Lacking the synchronization mechanism, the expressive power of communication-free Petri nets is somewhat limited. It is therefore importance to see whether the power of communication-free Petri nets can be enhanced without sacrificing their analytical capabilities. As a first step towards this line of research, in this paper our main concern is to investigate, from the decidability/complexity viewpoint, the reachability problem for a number of variants of communication-free Petri nets, including communication-free Petri nets augmented with 'static priorities,' 'dynamic priorities,' 'states,' 'inhibitor arcs,' and 'timing constraints.'

This paper proposes a pilot-based channel state information (CSI) feedback from a terminal to a base station (BS), considering the terminal's co-channel interference in a time-division duplex/multi-input multi-output system. In the proposed method, the terminal determines a precoding matrix according to the terminal's co-channel interference characteristics and transmits the precoded pilot signals on uplink. Using the responses of the precoded pilot signals, the BS determines appropriate weight vectors for downlink transmit beams considering the terminal's interference characteristics. Furthermore, the BS can predict the terminal's output signal-to-interference-plus-noise power ratio (SINR) for the downlink data stream. Numerical results show that the BS can achieve efficient transmission and accurate SINR prediction using the proposed CSI feedback.

As a method to realize a high-speed communication in the home network, the power-line communication (PLC) technique is known. A problem of PLC is that leakage radiation interferes with existing systems. When OFDM is used in a PLC system, the leakage radiation is not sufficiently reduced, even if the subcarriers corresponding to the frequency-band of the existing system are never used, because the signal is not strictly band-limited. To solve this problem, each subcarrier must be band-limited. In this paper, we apply the OQAM based multi-carrier transmission (OQAM-MCT) to a high-speed PLC system, where each subcarrier is individually band-limited. We also propose a pilot-symbol sequence suitable for frequency offset estimation, symbol-timing detection and channel estimation in the OQAM-MCT system. In this method, the pilot signal-sequence consists of a repeated series of the same data symbol. With this method, the pilot sequence approximately becomes equivalent to OFDM sequence and therefore existing pilot-assisted methods for OFDM are also applicable to OQAM-MCT system. Computer simulation results show that the OQAM-MCT system achieves both good transmission rate performance and low out-of-band radiation in PLC channels. It is also shown that the proposed pilot-sequence improves frequency offset estimation, symbol-timing detection and channel estimation performance as compared with the case of using pseudo-noise sequence.

This paper describes a general quantum lower bounding technique for the communication complexity of a function that depends on the inputs given to two parties connected via paths, which may be shared with other parties, on a network of any topology. The technique can also be employed to obtain a lower-bound of the quantum communication complexity of some functions that depend on the inputs distributed over all parties on the network. As a typical application, we apply our technique to the distinctness problem of deciding whether there are a pair of parties with identical inputs, on a k-party ring; almost matching upper bounds are also given.

The medical care day by day and more and more is associated with and reliant upon concepts and advances of electronics and electromagnetics. Numerous medical devices are implanted in the body for medical use. Tissue implanted devices are of great interest for wireless medical applications due to the promising of different clinical usage to promote a patient independence. It can be used in hospitals, health care facilities and home to transmit patient measurement data, such as pulse and respiration rates to a nearby receiver, permitting greater patient mobility and increased comfort. As this service permits remote monitoring of several patients simultaneously it could also potentially decrease health care costs. Advancement in radio frequency communications and miniaturization of bioelectronics are supporting medical implant applications. A central component of wireless implanted device is an antenna and there are several issues to consider when designing an in-body antenna, including power consumption, size, frequency, biocompatibility and the unique RF transmission challenges posed by the human body. The radiation characteristics of such devices are important in terms of both safety and performance. The implanted antenna and human body as a medium for wireless communication are discussed over Medical Implant Communications Service (MICS) band in the frequency range of 402-405 MHz.

In this letter, we present an exact analytic expression for the maximum signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) for receivers communicating with multiple transmitting nodes over a general time-varying channel, where one of the nodes is chosen as a desired signal source based on the instantaneous channel condition and the other nodes act as interference sources. As an illustrative example, the maximum SIR distribution of a mobile receiver surrounded by three base stations (BS) is determined in a closed-form formula for Rayleigh fading channels, and its accuracy is confirmed using simulation results.

We have proposed a tunable laser with silica-waveguide ring resonators. In this tunable laser, a semiconductor optical amplifier was passively aligned and mounted onto a silica-waveguide substrate. The ring resonators can be tuned by controlling their temperatures using the thermo optic heaters formed on them, and there are no mechanically moving parts. Thus, they are sufficiently stable and reliable for practical use. Our tunable laser exhibits a high fiber-output power of more than 15 dBm and a wide tunable range of 60 nm (L-band, 50 GHz spacing, 147 channels). Moreover, a tunable laser with a much wider tunable range of 96 nm using 100-GHz-FSR ring resonators is also reported.

Background modeling is one of the most challenging and time consuming tasks in motion detection from video sequence. This paper presents a background independent moving object segmentation algorithm utilizing the spatio-temporal information of the last three frames. Existing three-frame based methods face challenges due to the insignificant gradient information in the overlapping region of difference images and edge localization errors. These methods extract scattered moving edges and experience poor detection rate especially when objects with slow movement exist in the scene. Moreover, they are not much suitable for moving object segmentation and tracking. The proposed method solves these problems by representing edges as segments and applying a novel segment based flexible edge matching algorithm which makes use of gradient accumulation through distance transformation. Due to working with three most recent frames, the proposed method can adapt to changes in the environment. Segment based representation facilitates local geometric transformation and thus it can make proper use of flexible matching to provide an effective solution for tracking. To segment the moving object region from the detected moving edges, we introduce a watershed based algorithm followed by an iterative background removal procedure. Watershed based segmentation algorithm helps to extract moving object with more accurate boundary which eventually achieves higher coding efficiency in content based applications and ensures a good visual quality even in the limited bit rate multimedia communication.

Silicon photonic devices based on silicon photonic wire waveguides are especially attractive devices, since they can be ultra-compact and low-power consumption. In this paper, we demonstrated various devices fabricated on silicon photonic wire waveguides. They included optical directional couplers, reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers, 12, 14, 18 and 44 optical switches, ring resonators. The characteristics of these devices show that silicon photonic wire waveguides offer promising platforms in constructing compact and power-saving photonic devices and systems.

Scalability is one of the most important requirements for secure multicast in a multi-group environment. In this study, we propose a decentralized multi-group key management scheme that allows each multicast group sender to control the access to its group communication independently. Scalability is enhanced by local rekeying and inter-working among different subgroups. The group key secrecy and backward/forward secrecy are also guaranteed.

A novel timing synchronizing scheme is proposed for use in inter-vehicle communication (IVC) with an autonomous distributed intelligent transport system (ITS). The scheme determines the timing of packet signal transmission in the IVC network and employs the guard interval (GI) timing in the orthogonal frequency divisional multiplexing (OFDM) signal currently used for terrestrial broadcasts in the Japanese digital television system (ISDB-T). This signal is used because it is expected that the automotive market will demand the capability for cars to receive terrestrial digital TV broadcasts in the near future. The use of broadcasts by automobiles presupposes that the on-board receivers are capable of accurately detecting the GI timing data in an extremely low carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) condition regardless of a severe multipath environment which will introduce broad scatter in signal arrival times. Therefore, we analyzed actual broadcast signals received in a moving vehicle in a field experiment and showed that the GI timing signal is detected with the desired accuracy even in the case of extremely low-CNR environments. Some considerations were also given about how to use these findings.

It is known that perfectly secure (1-round, n-channel) message transmission (MT) schemes exist if and only if n ≥ 3t+1, where t is the number of channels that the adversary can corrupt. Then does there exist an almost secure MT scheme for n=2t+1 ? In this paper, we first sum up a number flaws of the previous almost secure MT scheme presented at Crypto 2004. We next show an equivalence between almost secure MT schemes and secret sharing schemes with cheaters. By using our equivalence, we derive a lower bound on the communication complexity of almost secure MT schemes. Finally, we present a near optimum scheme which meets our bound approximately. This is the first construction of provably secure almost secure (1-round, n-channel) MT schemes for n=2t+1.

A single chip NFC transceiver with Dual Antenna structure supporting not only NFC active and passive mode but also 13.56 MHz RFID reader and tag mode is designed and fabricated. The proposed NFC transceiver can operate as a RFID tag even without external power supply thanks to a dual antenna structure for initiator and target. The area increment due to additional target antenna is negligible because the target antenna is constructed by using a shielding layer of the initiator antenna.