We studied complicated superstable periodic orbits (SSPOs) in a spiking neuron model with a rectangular threshold signal. The neuron exhibited SSPOs with various periods that changed dramatically when we varied the parameter space. Using a one-dimensional return map defined by the spike phase, we evaluated period changes and showed its complicated distribution. Finally, we constructed a test circuit to confirm the typical phenomena displayed by the mathematical model.

Digitization of analog terrestrial TV broadcasting has recently been accelerated in many countries, and the effective utilization of vacant frequencies has also been investigated for new systems in each country. In Japan, a portion of vacant frequencies in the VHF-high band was allocated to the public broadband mobile communication (PBB) system. To evaluate the current PBB system and develop future broadband communication systems in this band, it is important to analyze the propagation channel more accurately. In this study, we characterize the propagation channel for 200MHz band broadband mobile communication systems, using measured channel impulse responses (CIRs). In the characterization process, the Saleh-Valenzuela (S-V) model is utilized to extract channel model parameters statistically. When evaluating the fluctuation of path power gain, we also propose to model the fluctuation of path power gain using the generalized extreme value distribution instead of the conventional log-normal distribution. The extracted CIR model parameters are validated by cumulative distribution function of root-means-square delay spread and maximum excess delay, comparing simulation result to measurement result. From the extracted CIR model parameters, we clarified the characteristics of 200MHz band broadband mobile communication systems in non-line-of-sight environments based on S-V model with the proposed channel model.

Computer-generated hologram based on ray-sampling plane method was newly applied to the projection-type holographic display that consists of the holographic projection and the holographic optical element screen. In the proposed method, geometric deformation characteristic of the holographic image via the display system was mathematically derived and canceled out by the coordinate transformation of ray-sampling condition to avoid the image distortion. In the experiment, holographic image reconstruction with the arbitral depth expression without image distortion could be optically demonstrated.

High-performance computing (HPC) has penetrated into various research fields, yet the increase in computing power is limited by conventional electrical interconnections. The proposed architecture, NEST, exploits wavelength routing in arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) to achieve a scalable, low-latency, and high-throughput network. For the intra pod and inter pod communication, the symmetrical topology of NEST reduces the network diameter, which leads to an increase in latency performance. Moreover, the proposed architecture enables exponential growth of network size. Simulation results demonstrate that NEST shows 36% latency improvement and 30% throughput improvement over the dragonfly on an average.

A new hybrid brain-computer interface (BCI), which is based on sequential controls by eye tracking and steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), has been proposed for high-speed spelling in virtual reality (VR) with a 40-target virtual keyboard. During target selection, gaze point was first detected by an eye-tracking accessory. A 4-target block was then selected for further target selection by a 4-class SSVEP BCI. The system can type at a speed of 1.25 character/sec in a cue-guided target selection task. Online experiments on three subjects achieved an averaged information transfer rate (ITR) of 360.7 bits/min.

In this letter, a new semi-blind approach incorporating the bounded nature of communication sources with the distance between the equalizer outputs and the training sequence is proposed. By utilizing the sparsity property of l1-norm cost function, the proposed algorithm can outperform the semi-blind method based on higher-order statistics (HOS) criterion especially for transmitting sources with non-constant modulus. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows superior performance over the HOS based semi-blind method and the classical training-based method for QPSK and 16QAM sources equalization. While for 64QAM signal inputs, the proposed algorithm exhibits its superiority in low signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) conditions compared with the training-based method.

As IoT services become more popular, mobile networks will have to accommodate a wide variety of devices that have different requirements such as different bandwidth limitations and latencies. This paper describes edge distributed mobile network architectures for the IoT era based on dedicated network technology and multi-access edge computing technology, which have been discussed in 3GPP and ETSI. Furthermore, it describes two context-aware control methods that will make mobile networks on the network architecture more efficient, reliable, and real-time: autonomous and distributed mobility management and bandwidth-guaranteed transmission rate control in a networked control system.

This paper proposes a novel environmental monitoring strategy, incremental environmental monitoring, that enables scientists to reveal the ecology of wild animals in the field. We applied this strategy to the habitat of endangered freshwater fish. Specifically, we designed and implemented a network-based system using distributed sensors to continuously monitor and record the habitat of endangered fish. Moreover, we developed a set of analytical tools to exploit a variety of sensor data, including environmental time-series data such as amount of dissolved oxygen, as well as underwater video capturing the interaction of fish and their environment. We also describe the current state of monitoring the behavior and habitat of endangered fish and discuss solutions for making such environmental monitoring more efficient in the field.

Job scheduling on many-core computers with tens or even hundreds of processing cores is one of the key technologies in High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Despite many scheduling algorithms have been proposed, scheduling remains a challenge for executing highly effective jobs that are assigned in a single computing node with diverse scheduling objectives. On the other hand, the increasing scale and the need for rapid response to changing requirements are hard to meet with existing scheduling models in an HPC node. To address these issues, we propose a novel adaptive scheduling model that is applied to a single node with a many-core processor; this model solves the problems of scheduling efficiency and scalability through an adaptive optimistic control mechanism. This mechanism exposes information such that all the cores are provided with jobs and the tools necessary to take advantage of that information and thus compete for resources in an uncoordinated manner. At the same time, the mechanism is equipped with adaptive control, allowing it to adjust the number of running tools dynamically when frequent conflict happens. We justify this scheduling model and present the simulation results for synthetic and real-world HPC workloads, in which we compare our proposed model with two widely used scheduling models, i.e. multi-path monolithic and two-level scheduling. The proposed approach outperforms the other models in scheduling efficiency and scalability. Our results demonstrate that the adaptive optimistic control affords significant improvements for HPC workloads in the parallelism of the node-level scheduling model and performance.

This paper mainly discusses the time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) estimation problem of digital modulation signal under impulsive noise and cochannel interference environment. Since the conventional TDOA estimation algorithms based on the second-order cyclic statistics degenerate severely in impulsive noise and the TDOA estimation algorithms based on correntropy are out of work in cochannel interference, a novel signal-selective algorithm based on the generalized cyclic correntropy is proposed, which can suppress both impulsive noise and cochannel interference. Theoretical derivation and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.

High energy cost is a big challenge faced by the current data centers, wherein computing energy and cooling energy are main contributors to such cost. Consolidating workload onto fewer servers decreases the computing energy. However, it may result in thermal hotspots which typically consume greater cooling energy. Thus the tradeoff between computing energy decreasing and cooling energy decreasing is necessary for energy saving. In this paper, we propose a minimized-total-energy virtual machine (VM for short) migration model called C2vmMap based on efficient tradeoff between computing and cooling energies, with respect to two relationships: one for between the resource utilization and computing power and the other for among the resource utilization, the inlet and outlet temperatures of servers, and the cooling power. Regarding online resolution of the above model for better scalability, we propose a VM migration algorithm called C2vmMap_heur to decrease the total energy of a data center at run-time. We evaluate C2vmMap_heur under various workload scenarios. The real server experimental results show that C2vmMap_heur reduces up to 40.43% energy compared with the non-migration load balance algorithm. This algorithm saves up to 3x energy compared with the existing VM migration algorithm.

The concept of threshold public key encryption (TPKE) with the special property called key re-splittability (re-splittable TPKE, for short) was introduced by Hanaoka et al. (CT-RSA 2012), and used as one of the building blocks for constructing their proxy re-encryption scheme. In a re-splittable TPKE scheme, a secret key can be split into a set of secret key shares not only once, but also multiple times, and the security of the TPKE scheme is guaranteed as long as the number of corrupted secret key shares under the same splitting is smaller than the threshold. In this paper, we show several new constructions of a re-splittable TPKE scheme by extending the previous (ordinary) TPKE schemes. All of our proposed schemes are based on discrete logarithm (DL)-type assumptions. Therefore, our results suggest that key re-splittability is a very natural property for DL-type TPKE schemes.

Multisignatures are digital signatures for a group consisting of multiple signers where each signer signs common documents via interaction with its co-signers and the data size of the resultant signatures for the group is independent of the number of signers. In this work, we propose a multisignature scheme, whose security can be tightly reduced to the CDH problem in bilinear groups, in the strongest security model where nothing more is required than that each signer has a public key, i.e., the plain public key model. Loosely speaking, our main idea for a tight reduction is to utilize a three-round interaction in a full-domain hash construction. Namely, we surmise that a full-domain hash construction with three-round interaction will become tightly secure under the CDH problem. In addition, we show that the existing scheme by Zhou et al. (ISC 2011) can be improved to a construction with a tight security reduction as an application of our proof framework.

Card-based cryptographic protocols provide secure multi-party computations using a deck of physical cards. The most important primitive of those protocols is the shuffling operation, and most of the existing protocols rely on uniform cyclic shuffles (such as the random cut and random bisection cut) in which each possible outcome is equally likely and all possible outcomes constitute a cyclic subgroup. However, a couple of protocols with non-uniform and/or non-cyclic shuffles were proposed by Koch, Walzer, and Härtel at Asiacrypt 2015. Compared to the previous protocols, their protocols require fewer cards to securely produce a hidden AND value, although to implement of such unconventional shuffles appearing in their protocols remains an open problem. This paper introduces “pile-shifting scramble,” which can be a secure implementation of those shuffles. To implement such unconventional shuffles, we utilize physical cases that can store piles of cards, such as boxes and envelopes. Therefore, humans are able to perform the shuffles using these everyday objects. Furthermore, we show that a certain class of non-uniform and/or non-cyclic shuffles having two possible outcomes can be implemented by the pile-shifting scramble. This also implies that we can improve upon the known COPY protocol using three card cases so that the number of cases required can be reduced to two.

The output feedback consensus problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems under a directed network with a time varying communication delay is studied. In order to deal with this problem, the dynamic output feedback controller with an additional low gain parameter that compensates for the effect of nonlinearity and a communication delay is proposed. Also, it is shown that under some assumptions, the proposed controller can always solve the output feedback consensus problem even in the presence of an arbitrarily large communication delay.

We consider a device-to-device (D2D) underlaid cellular network where D2D communications are allowed to share the same radio spectrum with cellular uplink communications for improving spectral efficiency. However, to protect the cellular uplink communications, the interference level received at a base station (BS) from the D2D communications needs to be carefully maintained below a certain threshold, and thus the BS coordinates the transmit power of the D2D links. In this paper, we investigate on-off power control for the D2D links, which is known as a simple but effective technique due to its low signaling overhead. We first investigate the optimal on-off power control algorithm to maximize the sum-rate of the D2D links, while satisfying the interference constraint imposed by the BS. The computational complexity of the optimal algorithm drastically increases with D2D link number. Thus, we also propose an on-off power control algorithm to significantly reduce the computational complexity, compared to the optimal on-off power control algorithm. Extensive simulations validate that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the computational complexity with a marginal sum-rate offset from the optimal algorithm.

Usowan is one of Nikoli's pencil puzzles. We study the computational complexity of Usowan puzzles. It is shown that deciding whether a given instance of the Usowan puzzle has a solution is NP-complete.

To learn the working situation of rod-pumped wells under ground, we always need to analyze dynamometer diagrams, which are generated by the load sensor and displacement sensor. Rod-pumped wells are usually located in the places with extreme weather, and these sensors are installed on some special oil equipments in the open air. As time goes by, sensors are prone to generating unstable and incorrect data. Unfortunately, load sensors are too expensive to frequently reinstall. Therefore, the resulting dynamometer diagrams sometimes cannot make an accurate diagnosis. Instead, as an absolutely necessary equipment of the rod-pumped well, the electric motor has much longer life and cannot be easily impacted by the weather. The electric power curve during a swabbing period can also reflect the working situation under ground, but is much harder to explain than the dynamometer diagram. This letter presented a novel deep learning architecture, which can transform the electric power curve into the dimensionless dynamometer diagram image. We conduct our experiments on a real-world dataset, and the results show that our method can get an impressive transformation accuracy.

We propose an analytical model for IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs). The analytical model uses macroscopic descriptions of the distributed coordination function (DCF): the backoff process is described by a few macroscopic states (medium-idle, transmission, and medium-busy), which obviates the need to track the specific backoff counter/backoff stages. We further assume that the transitions between the macroscopic states can be characterized as a continuous-time Markov chain under the assumption that state persistent times are exponentially distributed. This macroscopic description of DCF allows us to utilize a two-dimensional continuous-time Markov chain for simplifying DCF performance analysis and queueing processes. By comparison with simulation results, we show that the proposed model accurately estimates the throughput performance and average queue length under light, heavy, or asymmetric traffic.

This work is conducted to solve the current problem in the attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) scheme about how to securely and efficiently delegate the search rights to other users when the authorized user is not online. We first combine proxy re-encryption (PRE) with the ABKS technology and propose a scheme called attribute-based keyword search with proxy re-encryption (PABKS). The scheme not only realizes the functions of data search and fine-grained access control, but also supports search function sharing. In addition, we randomly blind the user's private key to the server, which ensures the confidentiality and security of the private key. Then, we also prove that the scheme is selective access structure and chosen keyword attack (IND-sAS-CKA) secured in the random oracle model. A performance analysis and security proof show that the proposed scheme can achieve efficient and secure data search in the cloud.