This paper presents a high-throughput sliding block Viterbi decoder for IEEE 802.11ac systems. A 64-state bidirectional sliding block Viterbi method is proposed to meet the speed requirement of the system. The decoder throughput goes up to 640Mbps, which can be further increased by adding the block parallelism. Moreover, a modified add-compare-select (ACS) unit is designed to enhance the working frequency. The modified ACS unit obtains nearly 26% speed-up, compared to the conventional ACS unit. However, the area overhead and power dissipation are almost the same. The decoder is designed in a SMIC 0.13µm technology, and it occupies 1.96mm2 core area and 105mW power consumption with an energy efficiency of 0.1641nJ/bit with a 1.2V voltage supply.

This paper presents some results of an experimental trial for the 5th generation (5G) wireless communication systems using 28GHz band. In order to tackle rapidly increasing traffic for 2020 and beyond, new radio access networks for the 5G mobile communication systems will introduce the use of higher frequency bands such as spectra higher than 10GHz to achieve higher capacity and super high bit rate transmission of several tens of Gbps. The target of this experimental trial is to evaluate the feasibility of using the 28GHz band with super-wide bandwidth of 800MHz for 5G wireless communication systems. To compensate large path-loss in higher frequency, the beamforming (BF) based on Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of promising techniques and can be combined with spatial multiplexing of multiple data streams to achieve much higher capacity. In addition, to support the mobility of mobile station (MS), beam tracking technique is important. In this trial, we first conduct a basic experiment of single-stream transmission by using prototype system with base station (BS) having 96-element antenna and MS having 8-element antenna to evaluate the effectiveness of joint transmitter/receiver BF in 28GHz band in terms of coverage, impact of path loss, shadowing loss and penetration loss under indoor, outdoor and outdoor-to-indoor (O-to-I) environments. We show that by using 28 GHz band with BF based on Massive MIMO, higher throughput near 1.2Gbps can be achieved at many points in the indoor environment. It is also shown that the throughput of over 1Gbps can be achieved at points around 200m distant from BS in outdoor line-of-site (LOS) environment. Secondly, to evaluate the effectiveness of spatial multiplexing and beam tracking under more realistic environment, we also conduct the outdoor experiment of BF combined with 2-stream spatial multiplexing in high mobility environment with MS speed of up to 60km/h by using smartphone-shape MS antenna. We also show that maximum throughput of 3.77Gbps can be achieved with MS speed of 60km/h by using BF with 2-stream multiplexing and beam tracking.

This work develops a third-order multibit switched-current (SI) delta-sigma modulator (DSM) with a four-bit switched-capacitor (SC) flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and an incremental data weighted averaging circuit (IDWA), which is fabricated using 0.18µm 1P6M CMOS technology. In the proposed DSM, a 4-bit SC flash ADC is used to improve its resolution, and an IDWA is used to reduce the nonlinearity of digital-to-analog converter (DAC) by moving the quantization noise out of the signal band by first-order noise shaping. Additionally, the proposed differential sample-and-hold circuit (SH) exhibits low input impedance with feedback and width-length adjustment in the SI feedback memory cell (FMC) to increase the conversion rate. A coupled differential replicate (CDR) common-mode feedforward circuit (CMFF) is used to compensate for the mirror error that is caused by the current mirror. Measurements indicate that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), dynamic range (DR), effective number of bits (ENOB), power consumption, and chip area are 64.1 dB, 64.4 dB, 10.36 bits, 18.82 mW, and 0.45 × 0.67 mm2 (without I/O pad), respectively, with a bandwidth of 20 kHz, an oversampling ratio (OSR) of 256, a sampling frequency of 10.24 MHz, and a supply voltage of 1.8 V.

Named Entity Translation Equivalents extraction plays a critical role in machine translation (MT) and cross language information retrieval (CLIR). Traditional methods are often based on large-scale parallel or comparable corpora. However, the applicability of these studies is constrained, mainly because of the scarcity of parallel corpora of the required scale, especially for language pairs of Chinese and Japanese. In this paper, we propose a method considering the characteristics of Chinese and Japanese to automatically extract the Chinese-Japanese Named Entity (NE) translation equivalents based on inductive learning (IL) from monolingual corpora. The method adopts the Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji Mapping Table (HKMT) to calculate the similarity of the NE instances between Japanese and Chinese. Then, we use IL to obtain partial translation rules for NEs by extracting the different parts from high similarity NE instances in Chinese and Japanese. In the end, the feedback processing updates the Chinese and Japanese NE entity similarity and rule sets. Experimental results show that our simple, efficient method, which overcomes the insufficiency of the traditional methods, which are severely dependent on bilingual resource. Compared with other methods, our method combines the language features of Chinese and Japanese with IL for automatically extracting NE pairs. Our use of a weak correlation bilingual text sets and minimal additional knowledge to extract NE pairs effectively reduces the cost of building the corpus and the need for additional knowledge. Our method may help to build a large-scale Chinese-Japanese NE translation dictionary using monolingual corpora.

With the availability of virtualization extension in mobile processors, e.g. ARM Cortex A-15, multiple virtual execution domains are efficiently supported in a mobile platform. Each execution domain requires high-performance graphics services for full-featured user interfaces such as smooth scrolling, background image blurring, and 3D images. However, graphics service is hard to be virtualized because multiple service components (e.g. ION and Fence) are involved. Moreover, the complexity of Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) device driver also makes harder virtualizing graphics service. In this paper, we propose a technique to virtualize the graphics architecture of Android mobile platform in KVM/ARM environment. The Android graphics architecture relies on underlying Linux kernel services such as the frame buffer memory allocator ION, the buffer synchronization service Fence, GPU device driver, and the display synchronization service VSync. These kernel services are provided as device files in Linux kernel. Our approach is to para-virtualize these device files based on a split device driver model. A major challenge is to translate guest-view of information into host-view of information, e.g. memory address translation, file descriptor management, and GPU Memory Management Unit (MMU) manipulation. The experimental results show that the proposed graphics virtualization technique achieved almost 84%-100% performance of native applications.

To use millimeter wave bands in future cellular and outdoor wireless networks, understanding the multipath cluster characteristics such as delay and angular spread for different polarization is very important besides knowing the path loss and other large scale propagation parameters. This paper presents result from analysis of wide-band full polarimetric double directional channel measurement at the millimeter wave band in a typical urban pico-cell environment. Only limited number of multipath clusters with gains ranging from -8dB to -26.8dB below the free space path loss and mainly due to single reflection, double reflection and diffraction, under both line of sight (LOS) and obstructed LOS conditions are seen. The cluster gain and scattering intensity showed strong dependence on polarization. The scattering intensities for ϑ-ϑ polarization were seen to be stronger compared to ϕ-ϕ polarization and on average 6.1dB, 5.6dB and 4.5dB higher for clusters due to single reflection, double reflection and scattering respectively. In each cluster, the paths are highly concentrated in the delay domain with delay spread comparable to the delay resolution of 2.5ns irrespective of polarization. Unlike the scattering intensity, the angular spread of paths in each cluster did not show dependence on polarization. On the base station side, average angular spread in azimuth and in elevation were almost similar with ≤3.3° spread in azimuth and ≤3.2° spread in elevation for ϑ-ϑ polarization. These spreads were slightly smaller than those observed for ϕ-ϕ polarization. On the mobile station side the angular spread in azimuth was much higher compared to the base station side. On average, azimuth angular spread of ≤11.4° and elevation angular spread of ≤5° are observed for ϑ-ϑ polarization. These spreads were slightly larger than in ϕ-ϕ polarization. Knowing these characteristics will be vital for more accurate modeling of the channel, and in system and antenna design.

This study proposes an effective pseudo relevance feedback method for information retrieval in the context of question answering. The method separates two retrieval models to improve the precision of initial search and the recall of feedback search. The topic-preserving query expansion links the two models to prevent the topic shift.

Previously, it is not obvious to what extent was accepted for the assessors when we see the 3D image (including multi-view 3D) which the luminance change may affect the stereoscopic effect and assessment generally. We think that we can conduct a general evaluation, along with a subjective evaluation, of the luminance component using both the S-CIELAB color space and CIEDE2000. In this study, first, we performed three types of subjective evaluation experiments for contrast enhancement in an image by using the eight viewpoints parallax barrier method. Next, we analyzed the results statistically by using a support vector machine (SVM). Further, we objectively evaluated the luminance value measurement by using CIEDE2000 in the S-CIELAB color space. Then, we checked whether the objective evaluation value was related to the subjective evaluation value. From results, we were able to see the characteristic relationship between subjective assessment and objective assessment.

An automotive control system is a typical safety-critical embedded software, which requires extensive verification and validation (V&V) activities. This article introduces a toolset for automated V&V of automotive control system, including a test generator for automotive operating systems, a task simulator for validating task design of control software, and an API-call constraint checker to check emergent properties when composing control software with its underlying operating system. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first integrated toolset that supports V&V activities for both control software and operating systems in the same framework.

In this paper, we propose a redundant task allocation method for multi-core systems based on the Duplication with Temporary Triple-Modular Redundancy and Reconfiguration (DTTR) scheme. The proposed method determines task allocation of a given task graph to a given multi-core system model from task scheduling in given fault patterns. Fault patterns defined in this paper consist of a set of faulty cores and a set of surviving cores. To optimize the average failure rate of the system, task scheduling minimizes the execution time of the task graph preserving the property of the DTTR scheme. In addition, we propose a selection method of fault patterns to be scheduled to reduce the task allocation time. In the experiments, at first, we evaluate the proposed selection method of fault patterns in terms of the task allocation time. Then, we compare the average failure rate among the proposed method, a task allocation method which packs tasks into particular cores as much as possible, a task allocation method based on Simulated Annealing (SA), a task allocation method based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP), and a task allocation method based on task scheduling without considering the property of the DTTR scheme. The experimental results show that task allocation by the proposed method results in nearly the same average failure rate by the SA based method with shorter task allocation time.

Self-Aligned Quadruple Patterning (SAQP) is an important manufacturing technique for sub 14nm technology node. Although various routing algorithms for SAQP have been proposed, it is not easy to find a dense SAQP compliant routing pattern efficiently. Even though a grid for SAQP compliant routing pattern was proposed, it is not easy to find a valid routing pattern on the grid. The routing pattern of SAQP on the grid consists of three types of routing. Among them, third type has turn prohibition constraint on the grid. Typical routing algorithms often fail to find a valid routing for third type. In this paper, a simple directed grid-graph for third type is proposed. Valid SAQP compliant two dimensional routing patterns are found effectively by utilizing the proposed directed grid-graph. Experiments show that SAQP compliant routing patterns are found efficiently by our proposed method.

We propose an architecture for a 1-bit band-pass delta-sigma modulator (BP-DSM) that outputs concurrent multiband RF signals. The proposed BP-DSM consists of parallel bandpass filters (BPFs) in the feedback loop to suppress the quantization noise at each target frequency band while maintaining the stability. Each BPF is based on second-order parallel infinite impulse response (IIR) filters. This architecture can unify and reconfigure the split BPFs according to the number of bands. The architecture complexity is proportional to the bandwidth of each RF signal and is independent of the carrier spacing between the bands. The conventional architecture of a concurrent multiband digital modulator, reported previously, has multiple input ports to the dedicated BPF at each band and so it cannot be efficiently integrated. Measurements show that the proposed architecture is feasible for transmitting a concurrent dual-band and a triple-band by changing the 1-bit digital data stream while keeping a data transmission rate of 10Gb/s. We demonstrate that the proposed architecture outputs the signal with LTE intra-band and inter-band carrier aggregation on 0.8GHz, 2.1GHz and 3.5GHz, each with 40MHz bandwidth in 120MHz aggregated bandwidth, whose bandwidth surpasses the bandwidth with carrier aggregation of LTE-A up to 100MHz. Adjacent channel leakage ratios of -49dBc and -46dBc are achieved at 3.5GHz in the concurrent dual-band and triple-band, respectively.

Feature representation, as a key component of scene character recognition, has been widely studied and a number of effective methods have been proposed. In this letter, we propose the novel method named coupled spatial learning (CSL) for scene character representation. Different from the existing methods, the proposed CSL method simultaneously discover the spatial context in both the dictionary learning and coding stages. Concretely, we propose to build the spatial dictionary by preserving the corresponding positions of the codewords. Correspondingly, we introduce the spatial coding strategy which utilizes the spatiality regularization to consider the relationship among features in the Euclidean space. Based on the spatial dictionary and spatial coding, the spatial context can be effectively integrated in the visual representations. We verify our method on two widely used databases (ICDAR2003 and Chars74k), and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results compared with the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we further validate the proposed CSL method on the Caltech-101 database for image classification task, and the experimental results show the good generalization ability of the proposed CSL.

Locally repairable codes have recently been applied in distributed storage systems because of their excellent local erasure-correction capability. A locally repairable code is a code with locality r, where each code symbol can be recovered by accessing at most r other code symbols. In this paper, we study the existence and construction of binary cyclic codes with locality 2. An overview of best binary cyclic LRCs with length 7≤n≤87 and locality 2 are summarized here.

Bayesian networks are a powerful approach for representation and reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. Of the many good algorithms for learning Bayesian networks from data, the bio-inspired search algorithm is one of the most effective. In this paper, we propose a hybrid mutual information-modified binary particle swarm optimization (MI-MBPSO) algorithm. This technique first constructs a network based on MI to improve the quality of the initial population, and then uses the decomposability of the scoring function to modify the BPSO algorithm. Experimental results show that, the proposed hybrid algorithm outperforms various other state-of-the-art structure learning algorithms.

We study a reconfiguration problem for Steiner trees in an unweighted graph, which determines whether there exists a sequence of Steiner trees that transforms a given Steiner tree into another one by exchanging a single edge at a time. In this paper, we show that the problem is PSPACE-complete even for split graphs, while solvable in linear time for interval graphs and for cographs.

During the development of a human embryo, the position of eyes moves medially and caudally in the viscerocranium. A statistical model of this process can play an important role in embryology by facilitating qualitative analyses of change. This paper proposes an algorithm to construct a spatiotemporal statistical model for the eyeballs of a human embryo. The proposed modeling algorithm builds a statistical model of the spatial coordinates of the eyeballs independently for each Carnegie stage (CS) by using principal component analysis (PCA). In the process, a q-Gaussian distribution with a model selection scheme based on the Aaike information criterion is used to handle a non-Gaussian distribution with a small sample size. Subsequently, it seamlessly interpolates the statistical models of neighboring CSs, and we present 10 interpolation methods. We also propose an estimation algorithm for the CS using our spatiotemporal statistical model. A set of images of eyeballs in human embryos from the Kyoto Collection was used to train the model and assess its performance. The modeling results suggested that information geometry-based interpolation under the assumption of a q-Gaussian distribution is the best modeling method. The average error in CS estimation was 0.409. We proposed an algorithm to construct a spatiotemporal statistical model of the eyeballs of a human embryo and tested its performance using the Kyoto Collection.

As autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been widely used to perform cooperative works with sensor nodes for data-gathering, the need for long-range AUVs has further grown to support the long-duration cooperation with sensor nodes. However, as existing data-gathering protocols for the cooperative works have not considered AUVs' energy consumption, AUVs can deplete their energy more quickly before fulfilling their missions. The objective of this work is to develop an AUV based data-gathering protocol that maximizes the duration for the cooperative works. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing protocols with respect to the long-range AUVs.

The power packet dispatching system, in which electric power is transferred in a pulse-shaped form with information, is expected to realize dynamical management of multiple power sources in independent systems such as robots. In this letter, close-loop control of a stepper motor by power packets is discussed. The precise angle control is achieved by the combined transfer of power and control information in experiments.

When the random variable has a completely monotone density function, we call it bursty (BRST) random variable. At first, we prove that the entropy of inter-arrival time is smaller than or equal to the entropy of inter-departure time in an infinite-server system GI/GI/∞ having general renewal arrivals. On the basis of that result, we prove that a BRST/GI/∞ having bursty arrivals and the associated loss system BRST/GI/c/c have the following paradoxical behavior: In the BRST/GI/∞, the stationary number of customers as well as the inter-departure time become stochastically less variable, as the service time becomes stochastically more variable. Also for the loss system BRST/GI/c/c, the blocking probability decreases and the inter-departure time becomes stochastically less variable, as the service time becomes stochastically more variable.