60GHz wireless communication requires analog baseband circuits having a bandwidth of about 1GHz. This paper presents a wide bandwidth current-mode low pass filter technique which involves current amplifiers, resistors and capacitors. The proposed current-mode filter is obtained by replacing an integrator employing an op-amp with another integrator employing a current amplifier. With the low input impedance current amplifier having little variation of the input impedance, the proposed filter is expected to improve linearity and power efficiency. The proposed current amplifier which employs super source follower topology with complementary input is suitable for the filter because of its class AB operation. Although simulation results shows the conventional current amplifier which employs super source follower topology without the complementary input has 12Ω variation and 30Ω input impedance, the proposed current amplifier has 1Ω variation and 21Ω input impedance. A fourth order 1GHz bandwidth filter which involves the proposed current amplifiers is designed in a 65nm CMOS technology. The filter can achieve IIP3 of 1.3dBV and noise of 0.6mVrms with power consumption of 13mW under supply voltage of 1.2V according to simulation results with layout parasitic extraction models. Active area of the filter is 380μm×170μm.

In heterogenous networks (HetNets), the deployment of small cells with the reuse of limited frequency resources to improve the spectral efficiency results in cross- and co-tier interference. In addition, the excessive power usage in such networks is also a critical problem. In this paper, we propose precoding and postcoding schemes to tackle interference and energy efficiency (EE) challenges in the two-tier downlink multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) HetNets. We propose transmission strategies based on hierarchical partial coordination (HPC) of the macro cell and small cells to reduce channel state information (CSI) exchange and guarantee the quality of service (QoS) in the upper tier with any change of network deployment in the lower tier. We employ the interference alignment (IA) scheme to cancel cross- and co-tier interference. Additionally, to maximize the EE, power allocation schemes in each tier are proposed based on a combination of Dinkelbach's method and the bisection searching approach. To investigate insights on the optimization problem, a theoretical analysis on the relationship between the maximum achievable EE and the transmit power is derived. Simulation results prove the superior EE performance of the proposed EE maximization scheme over the sum rate maximization approach and confirm the validity of our theoretical findings.

A novel spur cancelled clock generator (SCCG) capable of recovering RX sensitivity degradations caused by digital clocks in wireless SoCs is presented. Clock spurs that degrade RX sensitivities are canceled by applying the SCCG to digital circuits or ADCs. The SCCG is integrated into a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) SoC fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process. A measured clock spur reduction of 34 dB and an RX sensitivity recovery of 5 dB are achieved by the proposed SCCG. The power consumption and occupied area of the SCCG is only 18 µW and 40 μm × 120 μm, respectively.

This paper present a 20-GHz differential push-push voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) for 60-GHz frequency synthesizer. The 20-GHz VCO consists of a 10-GHz in-phase injection-coupled QVCO (IPIC-QVCO) with tail-filter and a differential output push-push doubler for 20-GHz output. The VCO fabricated in 65-nm CMOS technology, it achieves tuning range of 3 GHz from 17.5 GHz to 20.4 GHz with a phase noise of -113.8 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. The core oscillator consumes up to 71 mW power and a FoM of -180.2 dBc/Hz is achieved.

An output voltage-current equation of charge pump DC-DC voltage multiplier using diodes is provided to cover wide clock frequency and output current ranges for designing energy harvester operating at a near-threshold voltage or in sub-threshold region. Equivalent circuits in slow and fast switching limits are extracted. The effective threshold voltage of the diode in slow switching limit is also derived as a function of electrical characteristics of the diodes, such as the saturation current and voltage slope parameter, and design parameters such as the number of stages, capacitance per stage, parasitic capacitance at the top plate of the main boosting capacitor, and the clock frequency. The model is verified compared with SPICE simulation.

Improving robustness in electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection by inserting drain-side isolated silicon-controlled rectifiers (SCRs) in a high-voltage (HV) p-channel lateral-diffused MOSFET (pLDMOS) device was investigated in this paper. Additionally, the effects of anti-ESD reliability in the HV pLDMOS transistors provided by this technique were evaluated. From the experimental data, it was determined that the holding voltage (Vh) values of the pLDMOS with an embedded npn-arranged SCR and discrete thin-oxide (OD) layout on the cathode side increased as the parasitic SCR OD row number decreased. Moreover, the trigger voltage (Vt1) and the Vh values of the pLDMOS with a parasitic pnp-arranged SCR and discrete OD layout on the drain side fluctuated slightly as the SCR OD-row number decreased. Furthermore, the secondary breakdown current (It2) values (i.e., the equivalent ESD-reliability robustness) of all pLDMOS-SCR npn-arranged types increased (>408.4%) to a higher degree than those of the pure pLDMOS, except for npn-DIS_3 and npn-DIS_2, which had low areas of SCRs. All pLDMOS-SCR pnp-arranged types exhibited an increase of up to 2.2A-2.4A, except for the pnp_DIS_3 and pnp_DIS_2 samples; the pnp_DIS_91 increased by approximately 2000.9% (249.1%), exhibiting a higher increase than that of the reference pLDMOS (i.e., the corresponding pnp-stripe type). The ESD robustness of the pLDMOS-SCR pnp-arranged type and npn-arranged type with a discrete OD layout on the SCR cathode side was greater than that of the corresponding pLDMOS-SCR stripe type and a pure pLDMOS, particularly in the pLDMOS-SCR pnp-arranged type.

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has become a popular solution for media delivery over the mobile Internet. However, existing HAS systems are based on the pull-based HTTP/1.1 protocol, leading to high overheads (e.g., in terms of energy, processing, bandwidth) for clients, servers, as well as network nodes. The new HTTP/2 protocol provides a server push feature, which allows the client to receive more than one video segment for each request in order to reduce request-related overheads. In this study, we propose an adaptation method to leverage the push feature of HTTP/2. Our method takes into account not only the request-related overhead but also buffer stability and gradual transitions. The experimental results show that our proposed method performs well under strong throughput variations of mobile networks.

In this paper, we have investigated the characteristics of PdYb-silicide layer formed by the silicidation of Pd/Yb/n-Si(100) stacked structures for the first time. Pd (12-20 nm)/Yb (0-8 nm) stacked layers were deposited on n-Si(100) substrates by the RF magnetron sputtering at room temperature. Then, 10 nm-thick HfN encapsulating layer was deposited at room temperature. Next, silicidation was carried out by the RTA at 500°C/1 min in N2 followed by the selective etching. From the J-V characteristics of fabricated Schottky diode, Schottky barrier height (SBH) for electron was reduced from 0.73 eV of Pd2Si to 0.4 eV of PdYb-silicide in case the Pd/Yb thicknesses were 14/6 nm, respectively.

In this letter, we propose a Hadoop-based Video Transcoding System (HVTS), which is designed to run on all major cloud computing services. HVTS is highly adapted to the structure and policies of Hadoop, thus it has additional capacities for transcoding, task distribution, load balancing, and content replication and distribution. To evaluate, our proposed system, we carry out two performance tests on our local testbed, transcoding and robustness to data node and task failures. The results confirmed that our system delivers satisfactory performance in facilitating seamless streaming services in cloud computing environments.

This paper proposes performance improvement schemes for non-coherent multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems employing per transmit antenna differential mapping (PADM). PADM is one form of differential space-time coding (DSTC), which generates an independent differentially encoded sequence for each of the multiple transmit antennas by means of space-time coding and mapping. The features of the proposed schemes are as follows: 1) it employs an asymmetric space-time mapping instead of the conventional symmetric space-time mapping in order to lower the required signal to noise power ratio (SNR) for maintaining the bit error rate (BER) performance; 2) it employs an analytically derived branch metric criterion based on channel prediction for per-survivor processing (PSP) in order to track fast time-varying channels. Finally, computer simulation results confirm that the proposed schemes improve the required SNR by around 1dB and can track at the maximum Doppler frequency normalized by symbol rate of 5%.

In this paper, we consider optimal sensing scheduling for sequential cooperative spectrum sensing (SCSS) technique in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). Activities of primary users (PU) on a primary channel are captured by using a two states discrete time Markov chain process and a soft combination is considered at the FC. Based on the theory of optimal stopping, we propose an algorithm to optimize the cooperative sensing process in which the FC sequentially asks each CU to report its sensing result until the stopping condition that provides the maximum expected throughput for the CRN is satisfied. Simulation result shows that the performance of the proposed scheme can be improved by further shortening the reporting overhead and reducing the probability of false alarm in comparison to other schemes in literature. In addition, the collision ratio on the primary channel is also investigated.

The sub-blocking algorithm has been known as a core component in implementing a turbo decoder using a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) to use as many cores in the GPU as possible for parallel processing. However, even though the sub-blocking algorithm allows a large number of threads in a given GPU to be adopted for processing a large number of sub-blocks in parallel, each thread must access the global memory with strided addresses, which results in uncoalesced memory access. Because uncoalesced memory access causes a lot of unnecessary memory transactions, the memory bandwidth efficiency drops significantly, possibly as low as 1/8 in the case of an Long Term Evolution (LTE) turbo decoder, depending upon the compute capability of a GPU. In this paper, we present a novel method for converting uncoalesced memory access into coalesced access in a way that completely recovers the memory bandwidth efficiency to 100% without additional overhead. Our experimental tests, performed with NVIDIA's Geforce GTX 780 Ti GPU, show that the proposed method can enhance the throughput by nearly 30% compared with a conventional turbo decoder that suffers from uncoalesced memory access. Throughput provided by the proposed method has been observed to be 51.4Mbps when the number of iterations and that of sub-blocks are set to 6 and 32, respectively, in our experimental tests, which far exceeds the performance of previous works implemented the Max-Log-MAP algorithm.

Fuzzy techniques can implement the fine-grained access control of encrypted data in the Cloud because they support error-tolerance. In this system, using biometric attributes such as fingerprints, faces and irises as pubic parameters is advantageous over those systems based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). This is because biometric information is unique, unforgettable and non-transferable. However the biometric-attribute measurements are noisy and most of the existing encryption systems can not support the biometric-attribute encryption. Additionally, the previous fuzzy encryption schemes only achieve the selective security which is a weak security model. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new fuzzy encryption scheme based on the lattice in this letter. The proposed scheme is based on a hierarchical identity-based encryption with fixed-dimensional private keys space and thus has short public parameters and short private keys, which results in high computation efficiency. Furthermore, it achieves the strong security, i.e., adaptive security. Lastly, the security is reduced to the learning with errors (LWE) problem in the standard model.

Attaining extremely low latency service in 5G cellular networks is an important challenge in the communication research field. A higher QoS in the next-generation network could enable several unprecedented services, such as Tactile Internet, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. However, these services will all need support from powerful computational resources provided through cloud computing. Unfortunately, the geolocation of cloud data centers could be insufficient to satisfy the latency aimed for in 5G networks. The physical distance between servers and users will sometimes be too great to enable quick reaction within the service time boundary. The problem of long latency resulting from long communication distances can be solved by Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), though, which places many servers along the edges of networks. MEC can provide shorter communication latency, but total latency consists of both the transmission and the processing times. Always selecting the closest edge server will lead to a longer computing latency in many cases, especially when there is a mass of users around particular edge servers. Therefore, the research studies the effects of both latencies. The communication latency is represented by hop count, and the computation latency is modeled by processor sharing (PS). An optimization model and selection policies are also proposed. Quantitative evaluations using simulations show that selecting a server according to the lowest total latency leads to the best performance, and permitting an over-latency barrier would further improve results.

This paper presents the design and characterization of an E-band 16×16-slot monopulse array antenna with full-corporate-feed fabricated by the commercially available batch process of diffusion bonding of laminated copper plates. The antenna is multi-layered, and consists of vertically-interconnected radiating elements, a corporate-feed circuit and a comparator. It has four input ports for different excitations. Sum and difference beams in different cut-planes for monopulse operation can be generated. The antenna has a quasi-planar profile, and a total size of 13.31 λ0×13.31λ0×1.52λ0 (λ0 is the wavelength at the design frequency of 78.5GHz). The antenna demonstrates a wide operation bandwidth of 17.2 (70-87.2) GHz for VSWR < 2. At 78.5GHz: 1) for the sum beam, there is a 32.6-dBi realized gain (83% antenna efficiency) and a 33.3-dBi directivity (95% aperture efficiency); 2) for the difference beams in the E-, H-, 45°-, and 135°-planes, the null depths are -53.0, -58.0, -57.8, and -65.6dB, respectively. Across the full operation band where the sum main-beam and difference null are able to consistently point at the boresight, the antenna also demonstrates excellent performance in terms of high gain, high efficiency, high isolation, low cross-polarization, and distinguished monopulse capability.

This paper illustrates various content sharing systems that take advantage of cloud's storage and computational resources as well as their supporting conventional technologies. First, basic technology concepts supporting cloud-based systems from a client-server to cloud computing as well as their relationships and functional linkages are shown. Second, the taxonomy of cloud-based system models from the aspect of multiple clouds' interoperability is explained. Interoperability can be categorized into provider-centric and client-centric scenarios. Each can be further divided into federated clouds, hybrid clouds, multi-clouds and aggregated service by broker. Third, practical cloud-based systems related to contents sharing are reported and their characteristics are discussed. Finally, future direction of cloud-based content sharing is suggested.

Precise estimation of coronary arteries from computed tomography angiography (CTA) data is one of the challenging problems. This study focuses on automatic delineation of coronary arteries from 3D CTA data that may assess the clinicians in identifying the coronary pathologies. In this work, we present a technique that effectively segments the complete coronary arterial tree under the guidance of initial vesselness response without relying on heavily manual operations. The proposed method isolates the coronary arteries with accuracy by using localized statistical energy model in two directions provided with an automated seed which ensures an optimal segmentation of the coronaries. The detection of seed is carried out by analyzing the shape information of the coronary arteries in three successive cross-sections. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, the obtained results are compared with the reference data provided by Rotterdam framework for lumen segmentation and the level-set active contour based method proposed by Lankton et al. Results reveal that the proposed method performs better in terms of leakages and accuracy in completeness of the coronary arterial tree.

PPDP (Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing) is technology that discloses personal information while protecting individual privacy. k-anonymity is a privacy model that should be achieved in PPDP. However, k-anonymity does not guarantee privacy against adversaries who have knowledge of even a few uncommon individuals in a population. In this paper, we propose a new model, called k-presence-secrecy, that prevents such adversaries from inferring whether an arbitrary individual is included in a personal data table. We also propose an algorithm that satisfies the model. k-presence-secrecy is a practical model because an algorithm that satisfies it requires only a PPDP target table as personal information, whereas previous models require a PPDP target table and almost all the background knowledge of adversaries. Our experiments show that, whereas an algorithm satisfying only k-anonymity cannot protect privacy, even against adversaries who have knowledge for one uncommon individual in a population, our algorithm can do so with less information loss and shorter execution time.

Improvements in information technology have made it easier for industry to communicate with their customers, raising hopes for a scheme that can estimate when customers will want to make purchases. Although a number of models have been developed to estimate the time-varying purchase probability, they are based on very restrictive assumptions such as preceding purchase-event dependence and discrete-time effect of covariates. Our preliminary analysis of real-world data finds that these assumptions are invalid: self-exciting behavior, as well as marketing stimulus and preceding purchase dependence, should be examined as possible factors influencing purchase probability. In this paper, by employing the novel idea of hierarchical time rescaling, we propose a tractable but highly flexible model that can meld various types of intrinsic history dependency and marketing stimuli in a continuous-time setting. By employing the proposed model, which incorporates the three factors, we analyze actual data, and show that our model has the ability to precisely track the temporal dynamics of purchase probability at the level of individuals. It enables us to take effective marketing actions such as advertising and recommendations on timely and individual bases, leading to the construction of a profitable relationship with each customer.

Multi-view video streaming plays an important role in new interactive and augmented video applications such as telepresence, remote surgery, and entertainment. For those applications, interactive multi-view video transmission schemes have been proposed that aim to reduce the amount of video traffic. Specifically, these schemes only encode and transmit video frames, which are potentially displayed by users, based on periodical feedback from the users. However, existing schemes are vulnerable to frame loss, which often occurs during transmissions, because they encode most video frames using inter prediction and inter-view prediction to reduce traffic. Frame losses induce significant quality degradation due to the collapse of the decoding operations. To improve the loss resilience, we propose an encoding/decoding system, Frame Popularity-based Multi-view Video Streaming (FP-MVS), for interactive multi-view video streaming services. The main idea of FP-MVS is to assign intra (I) frames in the prediction structure for less/more popular (i.e., few/many observed users) potential frames in order to mitigate the impact of a frame loss. In addition, FP-MVS utilizes overlapping and non-overlapping areas between all user's potential frames to prevent redundant video transmission. Although each intra-frame has a large data size, the video traffic can be reduced within a network constraint by combining multicast and unicast for overlapping and non-overlapping area transmissions. Evaluations using Joint Multi-view Video Coding (JMVC) demonstrated that FP-MVS achieves higher video quality even in loss-prone environments. For example, our scheme improves video quality by 11.81dB compared to the standard multi-view video encoding schemes at the loss rate of 5%.