We have developed Multi-modal Neural Networks (MNN) to improve the accuracy of symbolic sequence pattern classification. The basic structure of the MNN is composed of several sub-classifiers using neural networks and a decision unit. Two types of the MNN are proposed: a primary MNN and a twofold MNN. In the primary MNN, the sub-classifier is composed of a conventional three-layer neural network. The decision unit uses the majority decision to produce the final decisions from the outputs of the sub-classifiers. In the twofold MNN, the sub-classifier is composed of the primary MNN for partial classification. The decision unit uses a three-layer neural network to produce the final decisions. In the latter type of the MNN, since the structure of the primary MNN is folded into the sub-classifier, the basic structure of the MNN is used twice, which is the reason why we call the method twofold MNN. The MNN is validated with two benchmark tests: EPR (English Pronunciation Reasoning) and prediction of protein secondary structure. The reasoning accuracy of EPR is improved from 85.4% by using a three-layer neural network to 87.7% by using the primary MNN. In the prediction of protein secondary structure, the average accuracy is improved from 69.1% of a three-layer neural network to 74.6% by the primary MNN and 75.6% by the twofold MNN. The prediction test is based on a database of 126 non-homologous protein sequences.

In this paper, we propose a statistical method of evaluating the pronunciation proficiency of English words spoken by Japanese. We analyzed statistically the utterances to note a combination that has a high correlation between an English teacher's score and certain acoustic features. We obserbed that the phoneme recognition rates (correct rate and accuracy) were the best measure of pronunciation proficiency, and the likelihood ratio of English phoneme acoustic models to phoneme acoustic models adapted by Japanese was the second best measure. The effective measure which was highly correlated with the English teacher's score was the combination of the likelihood for American native models, likelihood for English models adapted by Japanese, the best likelihood for arbitrary sequences of acoustic models, phoneme recognition rate and the rate of speech. We obtained a correlation coefficient of 0.81 with an open data for vocabulary and 0.69 with open data for speaker at the five words set level, respectively. The coefficient was higher than the correlation between humans' scores, 0.65. In the 15 words set level which corresponds to one or two sentences, we obtained the correlation coefficient of 0.86 with open data for the speaker.

This paper proposes a novel method to correct numerical phase velocity errors in FDTD meshes with nonuniform step size. It enables the complete compensation of the phase velocity errors introduced by the mesh grading for one frequency and one arbitrary direction of propagation independently of the mesh grading. This permits the usage of the Total-Field-Scattered-Field formulation in connection with electrically large nonuniform FDTD meshes and allows a general reduction of the grid dispersion errors. The capabilities of the proposed method are demonstrated with the help of two examples: (1) the fields in a dielectric sphere illuminated by a plane wave are calculated and (2) a patch antenna simulation demonstrates that the uncertainty in determining its resonance frequency can be reduced by about 50%.

Fuzzy inference abilities were implemented to electromagnetic problems for the first time by the authors. After very successful results of applying the developed fuzzy modeling method to input impedance of a general monopole antenna, in this paper classifying the engineering electromagnetic problems simply, we apply the abilities of the proposed fuzzy inference method to make a qualitative model for transmission lines as a general example for a certain category of problems. The proposed approach starts from observing the problem through the window of human direct understandings and uses some parameters (as calculation base) evaluated basic for modeling process. It is shown that because of using this novel view point, a very simple fuzzy system based on new parameters may model the behavior of a transmission line in general form. The knowledge of each variable can be extracted and saved as simple curves individually, through continuing to make several models considering the desired variable as parameter. Finally, it is shown that the proposed method works even in highly nonuniform transmission line cases without changing in structure and complexity.

A novel technique is developed to reconstruct a nonuniform transmission line by using arbitrary incident waveforms. By discretizing both the incident and reflected waves, we find that the ratio of reflected wave to incident wave has the same form as the reflection coefficient obtained by treating a nonuniform line as a cascaded, multiple-section signal line. A reconstruction scheme is derived to get the impedance profile of a nonuniform line. Some examples are presented to illustrate this new technique.

Based on genetic algorithm (GA) in this paper we present a simple method to extract distributed circuit parameters of a multiple coupled nonuniform microstrip transmission lines from it's measured or computed S-parameters. The lines may be lossless or lossy, with frequency dependent parameters. First a sufficient amount of information about the system is measured or computed over an specified frequency range. Then this information is used as an input for a GA to determine the inductance and capacitance matrices of the system. The theory used for fitness evaluation is based on the steplines approximation of the nonuniform transmission lines and quasi-TEM assumptions. Using steplines approximation the system of coupled nonuniform transmission lines is subdivided into arbitrary large number of coupled uniform lines (steplines) with different characteristics. Then using modal decomposition method the system of coupled partial differential equations for each step is decomposed to a number of uncoupled ordinary wave equations which are then solved in frequency-domain.

An efficient procedure is presented to determine the implicit exact solution of an arbitrary nonuniform transmission line (NTL), and its first order approximation (F. O. A. ) as an explicit expression. The method of the solution is based on the steplines approximation of the nonuniform transmission lines and quasi-TEM assumptions. Using steplines approximation the NTL is subdivided into a large number of uniform line segments (steps). Using time-domain approach and invoking the boundary conditions at the discontinuities of the adjacent steps, each step is modeled as continuous time domain linear filter characterized by a transfer function. The frequency domain transfer function of this filter is then obtained for linear termination networks. For very large number of steplines this transfer function approaches transfer function of the NTL. In the next step a F. O. A. , as an explicit expression of the exact response will be obtained. This F. O. A. is more suitable for very short transmission lines which is often the case in integrated circuits and some of printed circuit boards. Then, the F. O. A. of the ABCD matrix will be obtained.

This paper proposes a medium access control (MAC) protocol for single-hop WDM star-coupler networks, in which the number of stations is larger than the number of channels and the stations have arbitrary distances to the star coupler. The proposed protocol has one control channel for reserving the slots of data channels and several data channels which are used to transmit traffic. This paper also suggests a scheme that accomplishes load balancing among data channels for arbitrary traffic patterns between stations. Since this load balancing scheme diminishes an influence that traffic patterns have on the performance of the proposed MAC protocol, the proposed system is appropriate for systems which have asymmetric traffic intensity between stations. Throughput and mean message delay of the MAC protocol are analyzed using a discrete time Markov process and a D/G/1 queue with batch arrivals. The numerical results show that the performance is improved as the message length increases, the maximum round-trip propagation delay decreases, and the number of data channels increases.

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.

In this paper, we propose a novel power distribution method which can be adopted in case of the nonuniform distribution for mobiles in DS/CDMA distributed power cellular system. DS/SS distributed power cellular system has been proposed for achieving RAKE reception in micro-cellular environment. In forward link of this system, optimum power distribution method which can minimize the required total transmitting power has been discussed. The performance of this system has been shown in case of the uniform distribution for mobiles. In this paper, first, we propose a novel method in case of the nonuniform distribution. In the proposed method, replacing the path and its combinations of signals from base stations successively, we can find a new condition of less power distribution which is passed over in a conventional distribution method. We adopt simple distribution models for mobiles and compare the proposed method with the other methods by computing the total transmitting power and the quantity of calculations. As a result, we show that it is possible to almost obtain optimum power distribution by using the proposed method. Next, we adopt a nonuniform distribution model, in which the difference of the number of users exists only in the center cell. Using this model, we compare the proposed method with the other methods by computing the total transmitting power, the quantity of calculations, and a probability of impossible power distribution. Finally, in order to simplify and decrease the quantity of calculations of the proposed method, we propose a modified calculation algorithm which is applicable in case of that a new mobile station has increased. And we show the performance of this algorithm.

This paper describes the design concept and characteristics of a power supply for optical network units in Fiber To The Home (FTTH) systems. Powering architectures of local powering, network powering and power hub powering are compared in terms of cost and maintainability. A local powering architecture is selected for an ONU power supply because it is the most cost-effective overall compared with the others. The local power supply is mainly composed of a rectifier, DC-DC converters, a ringer, and batteries. A battery deterioration test function is important for the local power supply because battery lifetime varies depending on ambient temperature, discharge history, and charging conditions, and it is shorter than other electrical components used in ONU. Supplying power using alternative batteries is also necessary because the capacity of batteries installed in the power supply is limited. These functions and electrical characteristics are checked using an experimental power supply with Ni-Cd batteries.

This paper discusses a power save management method appropriate for the features of the fiber-optic access network based on Passive Double Star (PDS) topology, where PDS termination processing LSIs for the Optical Network Unit (ONU) operate intermittently and the usage rate is low at the residential customer. We developed PDS termination processing LSIs for the ONU, performed power management, and evaluated the degree of consumed power.

This paper is concerned with CDMA applied to personal and mobile communications on a global basis using multiple low earth orbital satellites (LEOS). We focus our attention on some unique aspects of LEOS systems and discuss their influences on the CDMA system performance as well as the techniques for coping with these aspects. We deal with three kinds of important items that are unique to LEOS systems; Doppler frequency shift due to satellite movement, propagation delay affecting packetized data transmission and geographical nonunifomity in traffic.

Nonuniform transmission lines are crucial in integrated circuits and printed circuit boards, because these circuits have complex geometries and layout between the multi layers, and most of the transmission lines possess nonuniform characteristics. In this article, an efficient numerical method for analyzing nonuniform transmission lines has been presented by using the Chebyshev expansion method and moment techniques. Efficiency on computational cost is demonstrated by numerical example.

There are many kinds of transmission lines such as uniform, nonuniform and nonlinear ones terminated by linear and/or nonlinear subnetworks. The nonuniform transmission lines are crucial in integrated circuits and printed circuit boards, because these circuits have complex geometries and layout between the multi layers, and most of the transmission lines possess nonuniform characteristics. On the other hand, the nonlinear transmission line have been focused in the fields of communication and instrumentation. Here, we present a new numerical method for analyzing nonuniform and nonlinear transmission lines with linear and/or nonlinear terminations. The waveforms at any points along the lines are described by the Fourier expansions. The partial differential equations representing the circuit are transformed into a set of ordinary differential equations at each frequency component, where for nonlinear transmission line, the perturbation technique is applied. The method is efficiently applied to weakly nonlinear transmission line. The nonuniform transmission lines terminated by a nonlinear subnetwork are analyzed by hybrid frequency-domain method. The stability for stiff circuit is improved by introducing compensation element. The efficiency of our method is illustrated by some examples.

An analytical framework to study the nonuniformity in geographical distribution of the traffic load in low earth orbit satellite communication systems is presented. The model is then used to evaluate the throughput performance of the system with direct-sequence packet spread-slotted ALOHA multiple-access technique. As the result, it is shown that nonuniformity in traffic makes the characteristics of the system significantly different from the results of uniform traffic case and that the performance of each user varies according to its location. Moreover, the interference reached from users of adjacent satellites is shown to be one of the main factors that limit the performance of system.

The discrete-time short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is known as a useful tool for analyzing and synthesizing signals. This paper introduces an extention of the well-known STFT to a general form which is more suitable for high resolutional signal analysis. A channel frequency division scheme is developed for realizing arbitrary bandwidth and center frequency so as to improve resolution performance. It is based on a nonuniform filter bank structure with integer decimation and interpolation factors. A design example of the generalized STFT using symmetric windows is given.

A modified beam propagation method based on the Galerkin's technique (FE-BPM) has been implemented and applied to the analysis of optical beam propagation in a tapered dielectric waveguide. It is based on a new calculation procedure using non-uniform sampling spacings along the transverse coordinate. Comparison with a conventional FE-BPM shows a definite improvement in saving computation time. The differences of a propagation field and a mean square power given by the proposed FE-BPM are discussed in comparison with the conventional FE-BPM.

A new method is proposed for automatically evaluating the English pronunciation quality of non-native speakers. It is assumed that pronunciation can be rated using three criteria: the static characteristics of phonetic spectra, the dynamic structure of spectrum sequences, and the prosodic characteristics of utterances. The evaluation uses speech recognition techniques to compare the English words pronounced by a non-native speaker with those pronounced by a native speaker. Three evaluation measures are proposed to rate pronunciation quality. (1) The standard deviation of the mapping vectors, which map the codebook vectors of the non-native speaker onto the vector space of the native speaker, is used to evaluate the static phonetic spectra characteristics. (2) The spectral distance between words pronounced by the non-native speaker and those pronounced by the native speaker obtained by the DTW method is used to evaluate the dynamic characteristics of spectral sequences. (3) The differences in fundamental frequency and speech power between the pronunciation of the native and non-native speaker are used as the criteria for evaluating prosodic characteristics. Evaluation experiments are carried out using 441 words spoken by 10 Japanese speakers and 10 native speakers. One half of the 441 words was used to evaluate static phonetic spectra characteristics, and the other half was used to evaluate the dynamic characteristics of spectral sequences, as well as the prosodic characteristics. Based on the experimental results, the correlation between the evaluation scores and the scores determined by human judgement is found to be 0.90.