This letter proposes an algorithm of determining the BER-minimized block delay for detection and the associated precoder design once the channel state information and limited transmission power are given. Simulation cases demonstrate the adjusting capability of the proposed algorithm for achieving best BER performance of the joint linear transceiver design.

In recent years, wireless communication technology has been studied intensively. In particular, MIMO which employs several transmit and receive antennas is a key technology for enhancing spectral efficiency. However, conventional MIMO architectures require some transceiver circuits for the sake of transmitting and receiving separate signals, which incurs the cost of one RF front-end per antenna. In addition to that, MIMO systems are assumed to be used in low spatial correlation environment between antennas. Since a short distance between each antenna causes high spatial correlation and coupling effect, it is difficult to miniaturize wireless terminals for mobile use. This paper shows a novel architecture which enables mobile terminals to be miniaturized and to work with a single RF front-end by means of adaptive analog beam-forming with parasitic antenna elements and antenna switching for spatial multiplexing. Furthermore, statistical analysis of the proposed architecture is also discussed in this paper.

We have developed a process for the fabrication of high-quality Nb/AlOx/Nb tunnel junctions with small area and high current densities for the heterodyne mixers at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. Their dc I-V curves are numerically studied, including the broadening of quasiparticle density of states resulting from the existence of an imaginary part of the gap energy of Nb. We have found both experimentally and numerically that the subgap current is strongly dependent on bias voltage at temperatures below 4.2 K unlike the prediction of the BCS tunneling theory. It is shown that calculated dc I-V curves taking into account the complex number of the gap energy agree well with those of Nb/AlOx/Nb junctions measured at temperatures from 0.4 to 4.2 K. We have successfully built receivers at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths with the noise temperature as low as 4 times the quantum photon noise, employing those high-quality Nb/AlOx/Nb junctions. Those low-noise receivers are to be installed in the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array) telescope and they are going into series production now.

To develop the advanced and rich life, and the also economy and social activity continuously, various types of energy are necessary. At the same time, to protect the global environment and to prevent the depletion of natural resources, the effective and moreover efficient use of energy is becoming important. Electric power is one of the most important forms of energy for our life and society. This paper describes topics and survey results of technical trends regarding the electric power supply systems which are playing a core role as the important infrastructure to support the emergence of information-oriented society. Specifically, the power supply systems that enhance high power quality and reliability (PQR) are important for the steady growth of information and communication services. The direct current (DC) power, which has been used for telecommunications power systems and information and communications technologies (ICT), enables existing utilities' grid and distributed energy resources to keep a balance between supply and demand of small-scaled power systems or microgirds. These techniques are expected to be part of smartgrid technologies and facilitate the installation of distributed generators in mission critical facilities.

In this paper, we propose a power amplifier linearization technique combined with iterative noise cancelation. This method alleviates the effect of added noises which prevents the predistorter (PD) from estimating the exact characteristics of the power amplifier (PA). To iteratively cancel the noise added in the feedback signal, the output signal of the power amplifier without noise is reconstructed by applying the inverse characteristics of the PD to the predistorted signals. The noise can be revealed by subtracting the reconstructed signals from the feedback signals. Simulation results based on the mean-square error (MSE) and power spectral density (PSD) criteria are presented to evaluate PD performance. The results show that the iterative noise cancelation significantly enhances the MSE performance, which leads to an improvement of the out-of-band power suppression. The performance of the proposed technique is verified by computer simulation and hardware test results.

Skyline queries on sensor networks have attracted much attention from the database research community due to their wide applications related to multi-criteria decision making. The existing methods use filters that are based on the data locality of sensor nodes and routing paths. However, they have two serious problems: i) unnecessary data transmission is still to frequent. ii) the processing cost of a continuous skyline query on high-dimensional data is very high. In this paper, we propose a new method that uses competitive mechanisms for processing continuous skyline queries. The proposed method dramatically reduces the data transmissions of sensors and quickly processes a continuous skyline query on high-dimensional data. An extensive performance study verifies the merits of our new method.

“Internet of Things” (IoT) requires information to be collected from “anything”, “anytime”, and “anywhere”. In order to achieve this, wireless devices are required that have (1) automatic data acquisition capability, (2) small size, (3) long life, and (4) long range communication capability. One way to meet these requirements is to adopt active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems. Active RFID is more advantageous than passive RFID and enables higher data reading performance over longer distances. This paper surveys active RFID systems, the services they currently promise to provide, technical problems common to these services, and the direction in which research should head in the future. It also reports the results of EPCglobal (EPC: Electronic Product Code) pilot tests conducted on global logistics for tracking ocean/air container transportation using active RFID systems for which we developed several new types of active RFID tags. The test results confirm that our active RFID tags have sufficient capability and low power consumption to well support ocean/air transportation and logistics service.

Service providers should monitor the quality of experience of a communication service in real time to confirm its status. To do this, we previously proposed a packet-layer model that can be used for monitoring the average video quality of typical Internet protocol television content using parameters derived from transmitted packet headers. However, it is difficult to monitor the video quality per user using the average video quality because video quality depends on the video content. To accurately monitor the video quality per user, a model that can be used for estimating the video quality per video content rather than the average video quality should be developed. Therefore, to take into account the impact of video content on video quality, we propose a model that calculates the difference in video quality between the video quality of the estimation-target video and the average video quality estimated using a packet-layer model. We first conducted extensive subjective quality assessments for different codecs and video sequences. We then model their characteristics based on parameters related to compression and packet loss. Finally, we verify the performance of the proposed model by applying it to unknown data sets different from the training data sets used for developing the model.

This paper proposes a diversity scheme for Multi-Input Multi-Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) based on Radio Frequency (RF) signal processing. Although a 22 MIMO-OFDM system can double the capacity without expanding the occupied frequency bandwidth, we cannot get additional diversity gain using the linear MIMO decomposition method. The proposed method improves the bit error rate (BER) performance by making efficient use of RF signal processing. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme gives additional diversity gain.

This paper examines the robust performance of a load torque observer for the position control of a surface-mounted permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) under parameter uncertainties. The load torque observer has been widely employed to compensate for unknown slow-varying disturbances without explicit analysis on the robustness against parameter uncertainties. By using the singular perturbation theory this paper presents an analysis on the robust performance of the load torque observer based on the reduced-order estimator. As the observer poles are placed sufficiently left of the complex plane, the feedforward compensation with estimation can recover nominal system performance without parameter uncertainties and load torque disturbance. An example shows the performance of the load torque observer.

This letter proposes a practical algorithm for video transmission of the scalable extension of H.264/AVC (SVC) over limited bit-rate and varying channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The proposal consists of SVC source-layer dropping and layered FEC using LDPC codes to maximize the video quality. The experimental results show that the proposed method realizes better video quality than the compared unequal error protection (UEP) without source-layer dropping. This implies that the dropping of a certain number of source-layers and using the resultant bit-budget for channel coding is more effective than the other UEP case which uses all possible source-layers.

In this paper, a new Hammerstein predistorter modeling for power amplifier (PA) linearization is proposed. The key feature of the model is that the cubic splines, instead of conventional high-order polynomials, are utilized as the static nonlinearities due to the fact that the splines are able to represent hard nonlinearities accurately and circumvent the numerical instability problem simultaneously. Furthermore, according to the amplifier's AM/AM and AM/PM characteristics, real-valued cubic spline functions are utilized to compensate the nonlinear distortion of the amplifier and the following finite impulse response (FIR) filters are utilized to eliminate the memory effects of the amplifier. In addition, the identification algorithm of the Hammerstein predistorter is discussed. The predistorter is implemented on the indirect learning architecture, and the separable nonlinear least squares (SNLS) Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is adopted for the sake that the separation method reduces the dimension of the nonlinear search space and thus greatly simplifies the identification procedure. However, the convergence performance of the iterative SNLS algorithm is sensitive to the initial estimation. Therefore an effective normalization strategy is presented to solve this problem. Simulation experiments were carried out on a single-carrier WCDMA signal. Results show that compared to the conventional polynomial predistorters, the proposed Hammerstein predistorter has a higher linearization performance when the PA is near saturation and has a comparable linearization performance when the PA is mildly nonlinear. Furthermore, the proposed predistorter is numerically more stable in all input back-off cases. The results also demonstrate the validity of the convergence scheme.

We implement one-out-of-two bit oblivious transfer (OT) based on the assumptions used in the McEliece cryptosystem: the hardness of decoding random binary linear codes, and the difficulty of distinguishing a permuted generating matrix of Goppa codes from a random matrix. To our knowledge this is the first OT reduction to these problems only. We present two different constructions for oblivious transfer, one based on cut-and-chose arguments and another one which is based on a novel generalization of Bennett-Rudich commitments which may be of independent interest. Finally, we also present a variant of our protocol which is based on the Niederreiter cryptosystem.

In this paper a novel and effective two phase admission control (TPAC) for QoS mobile ad hoc networks is proposed that satisfies the real-time traffic requirements in mobile ad hoc networks. With a limited amount of extra overhead, TPAC can avoid network congestions by a simple and precise admission control which blocks most of the overloading flow-requests in the route discovery process. When compared with previous QoS routing schemes such as QoS-aware routing protocol and CACP protocols, it is shown from system simulations that the proposed scheme can increase the system throughput and reduce both the dropping rate and the end-to-end delay. Therefore, TPAC is surely an effective QoS-guarantee protocol to provide for real-time traffic.

In orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFD-MA) uplink, the distortions introduced by both multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) and in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalances will severely degrade the system performance. With both CFOs and IQ imbalances, signal detection at the receiver becomes hard, if not impossible. In this letter, a linear receiver is proposed to cope with the distortions at a slight drop in system transmission rate. The analysis and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Existing query tree protocols deal with RFID tags in a blind manner. They query tags in a fixed bit order based on the assumption that the tag ID numbers are uniformly distributed throughout the range of the entire ID space because readers have no prior knowledge of the tags. This paper attempts to distinguish RFID applications where readers are already aware of all tags used by the application. We propose a heuristic query tree (H-QT) protocol that uses heuristic to select effective bits from known tags for the best queries in a divide and conquer approach. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol is superior to original query tree protocols because it significantly reduces the number of tag collisions and no tag response.

The explosive growth of Internet usage has caused problems for the current Internet in terms of traffic congestion within networks and performance degradation of end-to-end flows. Therefore, a reconsideration of the current Internet has begun and is being actively discussed worldwide with the goals of enabling efficient share of limited network resources (i.e., the link bandwidth) and improved performance. To directly address the inefficiency of TCP's congestion mitigation solely on the end-to-end basis, in this paper we propose an adaptive split connection scheme on advanced relay nodes; this scheme dynamically splits end-to-end TCP connections on the basis of congestion status in output links. Through simulation evaluations, we examine the effectiveness and potential of the proposed scheme.

This paper proposes Direct Spectrum Division Transmission with spectrum editing technique. The transmitter divides the single carrier modulated signal into multiple “sub-spectra” in the frequency domain and arranges each sub-spectrum so as to more fully utilize the unused frequency resources. In the receiver, the divided sub-spectra are combined in the frequency domain and demodulated. By editing the divided spectrum in the frequency domain, the total bandwidth occupied by the multiple “sub-spectra” is less than that of the modulated signal. The proposed technique allows the unused frequency resources scattered across the bands to be better utilized. Simulations show that the proposed technique makes the bit error rate negligible.

This paper proposes a method of designing EM absorber panels under oblique incident waves. TM and TE wave reflection characteristics of the absorber panel show its anisotropy under oblique incidence. By using the wire array sheet proposed this paper, TM and TE reflection coefficients in oblique incidence can be matched at almost the same frequency range.

Because of numerous circuit resources of FPGAs, there is a performance gap between FPGAs and ASICs. In this paper, we propose a small-memory logic cell, COGRE, to reduce the FPGA area. Our approach is to investigate the appearance ratio of the logic functions in a circuit implementation. Moreover, we group the logic functions on the basis of the NPN-equivalence class. The results of our investigation show that only small portions of the NPN-equivalence class can cover large portions of the logic functions used to implement circuits. Further, we found that NPN-equivalence classes with a high appearance ratio can be implemented by using a small number of AND gates, OR gates, and NOT gates. On the basis of this analysis, we develop COGRE architectures composed of several NAND gates and programmable inverters. The experimental results show that the logic area of 4-COGRE is smaller than that of 4-LUT and 5-LUT by approximately 35.79% and 54.70%, respectively. The logic area of 8-COGRE is 75.19% less than that of 8-LUT. Further, the total number of configuration memory bits of 4-COGRE is 8.26% less than the number of configuration memory bits of 4-LUT. The total number of configuration memory bits of 8-COGRE is 68.27% less than the number of configuration memory bits of 8-LUT.