This letter deals with a new cell clustering problem subject to signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) constraints in uplink network MIMO systems, where multiple base stations (BSs) cooperate for joint processing as forming a cluster. We first prove that the SINRs of users in a certain cluster always increase monotonically as the cluster size increases when the receiver filter that maximizes the SINR is used. Using this result, we propose an efficient clustering algorithm to minimize the maximum number of cooperative BSs in a cluster. Simulation results show that the maximum number of cooperative BSs minimized by the proposed method is close to that minimized by the exhaustive search and the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional one in terms of the outage probability.

In this paper, an effective per-antenna successive signal-to-leakage-plus-noise-ratio (PA-SSLNR) based precoding is proposed for multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel. The signal-to-leakage-plus-noise-ratio (SLNR) of per-antenna is calculated only using the unknown leakages and the known leakages are cancelled at the transmit side by Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP). The proposed scheme is different from per-user SSLNR. It does not need QR decomposition. The proposed precoding scheme is further improved by ordering antennas. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes exhibit a considerable bit error rate (BER) improvement over conventional SLNR scheme.

As a consequence of recent developments in communications, the parameters of communication signals, such as the modulation parameter values, are becoming unstable because of time-varying SNR under electromagnetic conditions. In general, it is difficult to classify target signals that have time-varying parameters using traditional signal recognition methods. To overcome this problem, this study proposes a novel recognition method that works well even for such time-dependent communication signals. This method is mainly composed of feature extraction and classification processes. In the feature extraction stage, we adopt Shannon entropy and index entropy to obtain the stable features of modulated signals. In the classification stage, the interval gray relation theory is employed as suitable for signals with time-varying parameter spaces. The advantage of our method is that it can deal with time-varying SNR situations, which cannot be handled by existing methods. The results from numerical simulation show that the proposed feature extraction algorithm, based on entropy characteristics in time-varying SNR situations,offers accurate clustering performance, and the classifier, based on interval gray relation theory, can achieve a recognition rate of up to 82.9%, even when the SNR varies from -10 to -6 dB.

In the literature, many resource allocation schemes have been proposed for multi-hop networks. However, the analyses provided focus mainly on the single cell case. Inter-cell interference severely degrades the performance of a wireless mobile network. Therefore, incorporating the analysis of inter-cell interference into the study of a scheme is required to more fully understand the performance of that scheme. The authors of this paper have proposed a parallel relaying scheme for a 2-hop OFDMA virtual cellular network (VCN). The purpose of this paper is to study a new version of that scheme which considers a multi-cell environment and evaluate the performance of the VCN. The ergodic channel capacity and outage capacity of the VCN in the presence of inter-cell interference are evaluated, and the results are compared to those of the single hop network (SHN). Furthermore, the effect of the location and number of wireless ports in the VCN on the channel capacity of the VCN is investigated, and the degree of fairness of the VCN relative to that of the SHN is compared. Using computer simulations, it is found that in the presence of inter-cell interference, a) the VCN outperforms the SHN even in the interference dominant transmission power region (when a single cell is considered, the VCN is better than the SHN only in the noise dominant transmission power region), b) the channel capacity of the VCN remains greater than that of the SHN even if the VCN is fully loaded, c) an optimal distance ratio for the location of the wireless ports can be found in the interval 0.2∼0.4, d) increasing the number of wireless ports from 3 to 6 can increase the channel capacity of the VCN, and e) the VCN can achieve better outage capacity than the SHN.

We describe an In-Cell Projected Capacitive Touch Panel in a display using IGZO TFT technology. The prototype demonstrates high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and pen input operation. The possibility of enlarging the display size beyond current limits makes this a highly promising approach for In-Cell Capacitive touch panels.

NROM is one of the emerging non-volatile-memory technologies, which is promising for replacing current floating-gate-based non-volatile memory such as flash memory. In order to raise the fabrication yield and enhance its reliability, a novel test and repair flow is proposed in this paper. Instead of the conventional fault replacement techniques, a novel fault masking technique is also exploited by considering the logical effects of physical defects when the customer's code is to be programmed. In order to maximize the possibilities of fault masking, a novel data inversion technique is proposed. The corresponding BIST architectures are also presented. According to experimental results, the repair rate and fabrication yield can be improved significantly. Moreover, the incurred hardware overhead is almost negligible.

In the next generation mobile network, the demand for high data rate transmission will require an increase in the transmission power if the current mobile cellular network architecture is used. Multihop networks are considered to be a key solution to this problem. However, a new resource allocation algorithm is also required for the new network architecture. In this paper, we propose a resource allocation scheme for a parallel relay 2-hop OFDMA virtual cellular network (VCN) which can be applied in a multiuser environment. We evaluate, by computer simulation, the ergodic channel capacity of the VCN using the proposed algorithm, and compare the results with those of the conventional single hop network (SHN). In addition, we analyze the effect of the location of the relay wireless ports on the ergodic channel capacity of the VCN. We also study the degree of fairness of the VCN, using the proposed scheme, compared with that of the SHN. For low transmission power, the simulation results show: a) the VCN can provide a better ergodic channel capacity and a better degree of fairness than the SHN, b) the distance ratio for which the ergodic channel capacity of the VCN is maximal can be found in the interval 0.20.3, c) the ergodic channel capacity of the VCN remains better than that of the SHN as the number of users increases, and d) as the distance between the relay WPs and the base station increases, the channel capacity of VCN approaches that of the SHN.

This paper explores the problem of semantic enrichment of mathematical expressions. We formulate this task as the translation of mathematical expressions from presentation markup to content markup. We use MathML, an application of XML, to describe both the structure and content of mathematical notations. We apply a method based on statistical machine translation to extract translation rules automatically. This approach contrasts with previous research, which tends to rely on manually encoded rules. We also introduce segmentation rules used to segment mathematical expressions. Combining segmentation rules and translation rules strengthens the translation system and archives significant improvements over a prior rule-based system.

We consider the problem of detecting and localizing of link quality degradations in transparent wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks. In particular, we consider the degradation of the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR), which is a key parameter for link quality monitoring in WDM networks. With transparency in WDM networks, transmission lightpaths can bypass electronic processing at intermediate nodes. Accordingly, links cannot always be monitored by receivers at their end nodes. This paper proposes the use of optical multicast probes to monitor OSNR degradations on optical links. The proposed monitoring scheme consists of two steps. The first step is an off-line process to set up monitoring trees using integer linear programming (ILP). The set of monitoring trees is selected to guarantee that significant OSNR degradations can be identified on any link or links in the network. The second step uses optical performance monitors that are placed at the receivers identified in the first step. The information from these monitors is collected and input to the estimation algorithm to localize the degraded links. Numerical results indicate that the proposed monitoring algorithm is able to detect link degradations that cause significant OSNR changes. In addition, we demonstrate how the information obtained from monitoring can be used to detect a significant end-to-end OSNR degradation even though there is no significant OSNR degradation on individual links.

A non-regular tree T with a prescribed branching sequence (s1,s2,...,sn) is a rooted and ordered tree such that its internal nodes are numbered from 1 to n in preorder and every internal node i in T has si children. Recently, Wu et al. (2010) introduced a concise representation called RD-sequences to represent all non-regular trees and proposed a loopless algorithm for generating all non-regular trees in a Gray-code order. In this paper, based on such a Gray-code order, we present efficient ranking and unranking algorithms of non-regular trees with n internal nodes. Moreover, we show that the ranking algorithm and the unranking algorithm can be run in O(n2) time and O(n2+nSn-1) time, respectively, provided a preprocessing takes O(n2Sn-1) time and space in advance, where .

MIMO two-way multi-hop networks are considered in which the radio resource is fully reused in all multi-hop links to increase spectrum efficiency while the adjacent interference signals are cancelled by MIMO processing. In addition, the nodes in the multi-hop network optimize their transmit powers to mitigate the remaining overreach interference. Our main contribution in this paper is to investigate an efficient relay placement method with power allocation in such networks. We present two formulations, namely QoS-constrained optimization and SINR balancing, and solve them using a sequential geometric programming method. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of convex optimization to find an efficient configuration. Simulation results show that relay placement has an important impact on the effectiveness of power allocation to mitigate the interference. Particularly, we found that an uniform relay location is optimal only in power-limited scenarios. With optimal relay locations, significant end-to-end rate gain and power consumption reduction are achieved by SINR balancing and QoS-constrained optimization, respectively. Furthermore, the optimal number of hops is investigated in power or interference-limited scenarios.

In this paper, we present the validity and potential capacity of a modeling and simulation environment for the nonresonant plasmonic terahertz (THz) detector based on the silicon (Si) field-effect transistor (FET) with a technology computer-aided design (TCAD) platform. The nonresonant and “overdamped” plasma-wave behaviors have been modeled by introducing a quasi-plasma electron charge box as a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in the channel region only around the source side of Si FETs. Based on the coupled nonresonant plasma-wave physics and continuity equation on the TCAD platform, the alternate-current (AC) signal as an incoming THz wave radiation successfully induced a direct-current (DC) drain-to-source output voltage as a detection signal in a sub-THz frequency regime under the asymmetric boundary conditions with a external capacitance between the gate and drain. The average propagation length and density of a quasi-plasma have been confirmed as around 100 nm and 11019/cm3, respectively, through the transient simulation of Si FETs with the modulated 2DEG at 0.7 THz. We investigated the incoming radiation frequency dependencies on the characteristics of the plasmonic THz detector operating in sub-THz nonresonant regime by using the quasi-plasma modeling on TCAD platform. The simulated dependences of the photoresponse with quasi-plasma 2DEG modeling on the structural parameters such as gate length and dielectric thickness confirmed the operation principle of the nonresonant plasmonic THz detector in the Si FET structure. The proposed methodologies provide the physical design platform for developing novel plasmonic THz detectors operating in the nonresonant detection mode.

This paper proposes an enhanced feature detection method for the OFDM signals of digital TV (DTV) standards, namely Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) and Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T). The proposed method exploits property of time-domain sliding correlation results of DTV signals with the pilots that are inserted into OFDM symbols. Some correlation outputs are much larger than the remaining outputs and are called correlation peaks here, and, the distance between their positions in the correlation output sequence keep constant regardless of the received DTV timings. The proposed method then derives sensing test statistic with improved SNR by aggregating the correlation peaks based on their positions. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated by both computer simulation and hardware implementation. Simulation results for DVB-T detection verify that compared to the optimal conventional sensing method, the proposed method achieves superior sensing performance. It reduces sampling time by about 25% for the same sensing performance while increasing computational complexity by around 0.0001%. Hardware performance further verifies that the proposed method is able to accurately detect ISDB-T at the low SNR of -14.5 dB by employing 8 OFDM symbol durations of samples.

BitTorrent is one of the most popular P2P file sharing applications worldwide. Each BitTorrent network is called a swarm, and millions of peers may join multiple swarms. However, there are many unreachable peers (NATed (network address translated), firewalled, or inactive at the time of measurement) in each swarm; hence, existing techniques can only measure a part of all the peers in a swarm. In this paper, we propose an improved measurement method for BitTorrent swarms that include many unreachable peers. In essence, NATed peers and those behind firewalls are found by allowing them to connect to our crawlers by actively advertising our crawlers' addresses. Evaluation results show that the proposed method increases the number of unique contacted peers by 112% compared to the conventional method. Moreover, the proposed method increases the total volume of downloaded pieces by 66%. We investigate the sampling bias among the proposed and conventional methods, and we find that different measurement methods yield significantly different results.

Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) devices need detect and avoid techniques in order to avoid or reduce interference to primary systems whose spectra overlap bands of the UWB systems. Some avoidance techniques require a knowledge of signal level received from the primary systems to control the transmitted power. Thus, detection schemes have to accurately estimate the primary signal level using the observed signal includes an additive noise and to provide it for the avoidance schemes. In this paper, we propose a new method to estimate the Primary Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) for the detection scheme. Our proposed method uses the fast Fourier transform output of a Multi-Band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing system. We generate models based on whether the primary signals are present, estimate the PSNR using a maximum likelihood criterion in each model and obtain the PSNR estimate by selecting the most preferable model using an Akaike information criterion. The propose method does not need any a priori information of the primary signal and the additive noise. By computer simulations, we evaluate an accuracy of the PSNR estimation of the proposed method.

A multiuser precoding algorithm based on matching weighted signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (SLNR) is proposed for multiuser MIMO downlink systems. In the proposed algorithm, the matching weight factor is selected based on the effective channel gain, and the leakage power caused by each user is weighted by the factor. The precoding vector is obtained by maximizing the matching weighted SLNR. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed scheme in terms of bit error rate over the conventional SLNR schemes.

Image warping is usually used to perform real-time geometric transformation of the images captured by the CMOS image sensor of video camera. Several existing look-up table (LUT)-based algorithms achieve real-time performance; however, the size of the LUT is still large, and it has to be stored in off-chip memory. To reduce latency and bandwidth due to the use of off-chip memory, this paper proposes an improved LUT (ILUT) scheme that compresses the LUT to the point that it can be stored in on-chip memory. First, a one-step transformation is adopted instead of using several on-line calculation stages. The memory size of the LUT is then reduced by utilizing the similarity of neighbor coordinates, as well as the symmetric characteristic of video camera images. Moreover, an elaborate pipeline hardware structure, cooperating with a novel 25-point interpolation algorithm, is proposed to accelerate the system and reduce further memory usage. The proposed system is implemented by a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based platform. Two different examples show that the proposed ILUT achieves real-time performance with small memory usage and low system requirements.

An on-chip soft-start circuit based on a switched-capacitor for DC-DC switching regulator is presented. A ramp-voltage, which is generated by a switched-capacitor, is used to make pulse width slowly increase from zero, in order to eliminate the inrush current and the overshoot voltage during start-up. The post simulation results show that the regulator soft starts well with the proposed soft-start circuit.

In this paper, we propose a successive signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) based precoding with geometric mean decomposition (GMD) for the downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. The known leakages are canceled at the transmit side, and SLNR is calculated with the unknown leakages. GMD is applied to cancel the known leakages, so the subchannels for each receiver have equal gain. We further improve the proposed precoding scheme by ordering users. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes have a considerable bit error rate (BER) improvement over the original SLNR scheme.

This paper presents a novel CMOS readout circuit for satellite infrared time delay and integration (TDI) arrays. An integrate-while-read method is adopted, and a dead-pixel-elimination circuit for solving a critical problem of the TDI scheme is integrated within a chip. In addition, an adaptive charge capacity control method is proposed to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for low-temperature targets. The readout circuit was fabricated with a 0.35-µm CMOS process for a 5004 mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR) HgCdTe detector array. Using the circuit, a 90% background-limited infrared photodetection (BLIP) is satisfied over a wide input range (∼200–330 K), and the SNR is improved by 11 dB for the target temperature of 200 K.