Mobile communication have become an important part of telecommunications. Original applications like paging, mobile phones or GPS have shown a tremendous growth, and new applications are emerging every day: tagging, wireless computer links, wireless microphones, remote control, wireless multimedia links, satellite mobile phones, wireless internet. Mobile means light, small, with low energy consumption and appealing designs. Technology has evolved very fast to satisfy these needs in rapidly growing markeds: chips are becoming smaller, consume less current, are more efficient and perform more complex operations. The antennas however have not experienced the same evolution, as the size of an antenna is mainly dictated by the frequency band it has to transmit or receive. Thus, the art of antenna miniaturization is an art of compromise: one has to design the smallest possible antenna, which is still suitable for a given application regarding its radiation characteristics. Or in other words, one looks for the best compromise between volume, bandwidth and efficiency. In this paper, we will go through classical design techniques, starting from ultra small antennas and going UWB antennas over multiband designs.

In this paper, we present a new three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment (3DVE) system named "QuViE/P", which can enhance quality of service (QoS), that users actually feel, as good as possible when resources of computers and networks are limited. To realize this, we focus on characteristics of user's perceptual quality evaluation on 3D objects. We propose an effective QoS control scheme for QuViE/P by introducing relationships between system's internal quality parameters and user's perceptual quality parameters. This scheme can appropriately maintain the QoS of the 3DVE system and it is expected to improve convenience when using 3DVE system where resources are insufficient. We designed and implemented a prototype of QuViE/P using a multiagent framework. The experiment results show that even when the computer resource is reduced to 20% of the required amount, the proposed scheme can maintain the quality of important objects to a certain level.

This paper proposes a new color halftone image quality assessment method based upon the color structural similarity measure with considering the human visual characteristics. To include the color visual characteristics, we carry out the color filtering for each luminance, red-green, and blue-yellow channels. Then, we apply the color structural similarity measure to the color filtered images, which are the reference image and the halftoned image, to evaluate the localized structural difference. By considering those characteristics, in this paper, the assessment of the color halftone images can be realized. We apply the proposed measure to the various kinds of color halftone images and confirm that the proposed measure can give reasonable results compared with the results by subjective evaluation.

This paper proposes a combination of adaptive equalizer and Least Mean Square-RAKE (LMS-RAKE) combining scheme receiver system for Direct Sequence-Ultra Wideband (DS-UWB) multipath channel model. The main purpose of the proposed system is to overcome the performance degradation for UWB transmission due to the occurrence of Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) during high speed transmission of ultra short pulses in a multipath channel. The proposed system improves the system performance by mitigating the multipath effect using LMS-RAKE receiver and suppressing the ISI effect with the adaptive equalizer. Simulation results verify that significant equalization gain can be obtained by the proposed system especially in UWB multipath channel models such as channel CM3 and channel CM4 that suffered severe ISI effect.

Recently, a new frequency-domain equalization (FDE) technique, called overlap FDE, that requires no GI insertion was proposed. However, the residual inter/intra-block interference (IBI) cannot completely be removed. In addition to this, for multicode direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA), the presence of residual inter-chip interference (ICI) after FDE distorts orthogonality among the spreading codes. In this paper, we propose an iterative overlap FDE for multicode DS-CDMA to suppress both the residual IBI and the residual ICI. In the iterative overlap FDE, joint minimum mean square error (MMSE)-FDE and ICI cancellation is repeated a sufficient number of times. The bit error rate (BER) performance with the iterative overlap FDE is evaluated by computer simulation.

Recent advancements in the ubiquitous sensor network field have brought considerable feasibility to the realization of a ubiquitous society. A ubiquitous sensor network will enable the cooperative gathering of environmental information or the detection of special events through a large number of spatially distributed sensor nodes. Thus far, radio frequency identification (RFID) as an application for realizing the ubiquitous environment has mainly been developed for public and industrial systems. To this end, the most existing applications have demanded low-end antennas. In recent years, interests of ubiquitous sensor network have been broadened to medical body area networks (BAN), wireless personal area networks (WPAN), along with ubiquitous smart worlds. This increasing attention toward in ubiquitous sensor network has great implications for antennas. The design of functional antennas has received much attention because they can provide various kinds of properties and operation modes. These high-end antennas have some functions besides radiation. Furthermore, smart sensor nodes equipped with cooperated high-end antennas would allow them to respond adaptively to environmental events. Therefore, some design approaches of functional antennas with sensing and reconfigurability as high-end solution for smart sensor node, as well as low-end antennas for mobile RFID (mRFID) and SAW transponder are presented in this paper.

As a technique for calibrating electric-field probes used in standardized SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) assessment, we have studied the technique using the Friis transmission formula in the tissue-equivalent liquid. It is difficult to measure power transmission between two reference antennas in the far-field region due to large attenuation in the liquid. This means that the conventional Friis transmission formula cannot be applied to our measurement so that we developed an extension of this formula that is valid in the near-field region. In this paper, the method of weighted least squares is introduced to reduce the effect of the noise in the measurement system when the gain of the antenna operated in the liquid is determined by the curve-fitting technique. And we examine how to choose the fitting range to reduce the uncertainty of the estimated gain.

We investigate the problem of joint transmitter and receiver power allocation with the minimax mean square error (MSE) criterion for uplink transmissions in a multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system. The objective of power allocation is to minimize the maximum MSE among all users each of which has limited transmit power. This problem is a nonlinear optimization problem. Using the Lagrange multiplier method, we derive the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions which are necessary for a power allocation to be optimal. Numerical results indicate that, compared to the minimum total MSE criterion, the minimax MSE criterion yields a higher total MSE but provides a fairer treatment across the users. The advantages of the minimax MSE criterion are more evident when we consider the bit error rate (BER) estimates. Numerical results show that the minimax MSE criterion yields a lower maximum BER and a lower average BER. We also observe that, with the minimax MSE criterion, some users do not transmit at full power. For comparison, with the minimum total MSE criterion, all users transmit at full power. In addition, we investigate robust joint transmitter and receiver power allocation where the channel state information (CSI) is not perfect. The CSI error is assumed to be unknown but bounded by a deterministic value. This problem is formulated as a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem with bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) constraints. Numerical results show that, with imperfect CSI, the minimax MSE criterion also outperforms the minimum total MSE criterion in terms of the maximum and average BERs.

A low distortion and low noise differential amplifier using the difference between the even- and odd-mode impedances is proposed. In order to realize an amplifier with high OIP3 and low NF characteristics, the impedance of the bias circuit should be low (<300 Ω) at the difference frequency and high (>4 kΩ) at the carrier frequency. Although the frequency response of the bias circuit impedance can only meet these conditions with difficulty, owing to the 20 MHz Tx signal bandwidth for 3G LTE, the proposed amplifier can achieve the impedance difference using the properties of a differential configuration where the difference frequency signal is the even-mode and the carrier frequency is the odd-mode. It has been demonstrated that the NF of the proposed amplifier, which has been fabricated in 0.18 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology operating at 2.14 GHz, can be kept to 1.6 dB or less and an OIP3 of 9.0 dBm can be achieved, which is 3 dB higher than that of a conventional amplifier, in the condition where the power gain is greater than 18 dB.

Very high-speed data services are demanded in the next generation wireless systems. However, the available bandwidth is limited. The use of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) multiplexing can increase the transmission rate without bandwidth expansion. For high-speed data transmission, however, the channel becomes severely frequency-selective and the achievable bit error rate (BER) performance degrades. In our previous work, we proposed the joint use of iterative frequency-domain parallel interference cancellation (PIC) and two-dimensional (2D) MMSE-FDE for the non-spread single-carrier (SC) transmission in a frequency-selective fading channel. The joint use of PIC and 2D MMSE-FDE can effectively suppress the inter-path interference (IPI) and the inter-code interference (ICI), resulting from the channel frequency-selectivity, and the interference from other antennas simultaneously. An iterative PIC with 2D MMSE-FDE has a high computational complexity. In this paper, to well suppress the interference from other antennas while reducing the computational complexity, we propose to replace 2D MMSE-FDE by 1D MMSE-FDE except for the initial iteration stage and to use multicode spread-spectrum (SS) transmission instead of the non-spread SC transmission. The BER performance of the proposed scheme in a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel is evaluated by computer simulation to show that the proposed scheme can basically match the BER performance of 2D MMSE-FDE with lower complexity.

In this letter, the effect of distorted constellation shapes of 16-ary modulation due to the power saturation channel is analyzed. In particular, error bounds for 16-QAM and 16-APSK with distorted constellations are derived, and optimal operating points in terms of Es/N0 are presented. The result can be used to accurately predict the performance of these modulation schemes with a given level of the constellation distortion, as well as to determine the amount of input power to the saturation channel which minimizes the probability of modulation symbol error.

In this paper, we present a multiple capture approach to reducing the peak power as well as average power consumption during testing. The basic idea behind is to divide a scan chain into two sub-scan chains, and only one sub-scan chain will be enabled at a time during the scan shift or capture operations. We develop a pattern insertion technique to efficiently deal with the capture violation problem during the capture cycle. In order to alleviate the timing cost due to the insertion of redundant patterns, a scan chain partitioning method incorporated with test pattern reordering is developed to reduce the testing time. Experimental results for large ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show that the proposed approach can efficiently reduce peak and average power with little timing overhead.

In this paper, we present an efficient fingerprint classification algorithm which is an essential component in many critical security application systems e.g. systems in the e-government and e-finance domains. Fingerprint identification is one of the most important security requirements in homeland security systems such as personnel screening and anti-money laundering. The problem of fingerprint identification involves searching (matching) the fingerprint of a person against each of the fingerprints of all registered persons. To enhance performance and reliability, a common approach is to reduce the search space by firstly classifying the fingerprints and then performing the search in the respective class. Jain et al. proposed a fingerprint classification algorithm based on a two-stage classifier, which uses a K-nearest neighbor classifier in its first stage. The fingerprint classification algorithm is based on the fingercode representation which is an encoding of fingerprints that has been demonstrated to be an effective fingerprint biometric scheme because of its ability to capture both local and global details in a fingerprint image. We enhance this approach by improving the efficiency of the K-nearest neighbor classifier for fingercode-based fingerprint classification. Our research firstly investigates the various fast search algorithms in vector quantization (VQ) and the potential application in fingerprint classification, and then proposes two efficient algorithms based on the pyramid-based search algorithms in VQ. Experimental results on DB1 of FVC 2004 demonstrate that our algorithms can outperform the full search algorithm and the original pyramid-based search algorithms in terms of computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy.

This letter presents the performance of ultra-wideband multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UWB MB-OFDM) systems with an extra diversity. To fully obtain diversity gain in the current MB-OFDM system when a time-domain spreading (TDS) is adopted, two consecutive OFDM symbols are designed to be cyclic shifted against each other. Simulation results indicate that the MB-OFDM system using additional frequency diversity outperforms conventional MB-OFDM system.

The MIMO system can meet the growing demand for higher capacity in wireless communication fields. So far, the authors have reported that, based on channel measurements, uncoded performance of narrowband MIMO spatial multiplexing in indoor line-of-sight (LOS) environments generally outperforms that in non-LOS (NLOS) ones under the same transmit power condition. In space-frequency coded MIMO-OFDM spatial multiplexing, however, we cannot expect high space-frequency diversity gain in LOS environments because of high fading correlations and low frequency selectivity of channels so that the performance may degrade unlike uncoded cases. In this letter, we present the practical performance of coded MIMO-OFDM spatial multiplexing based on indoor channel measurements. The results show that an LOS environment tends to provide lower space-frequency diversity effect whereas the MIMO-OFDM spatial multiplexing performance is still better in the environment compared with an NLOS environment.

The purpose of this study is to design, analyze and calibrate a pre-modulation filter with a variable cutoff frequency property for the PCM/FM transmission system. The effect of the pre-modulation filter reduces the energy contained in the sidebands of the modulated carrier. Most existing filters are based on a constant cutoff frequency specification. The onboard units of the launch vehicle which have been performed by the functional and environmental tests should not be revised by any hardware modifications from a reliability point of view. In case of the VCU in this paper, it is necessary to change the PCM bit rate and the cutoff frequency of the pre-modulation filter with software programming in order to improve the picture quality in the allowable bandwidth even if the unit has already been manufactured. In addition, the link margin around the satellite separation event is very low because the flight range is more than 2000 km. Under the same RF power condition, the reduction of the transmitting data rate will result in an increase of link margin. For this, the pre-modulation filter should have the variable cutoff frequency property with software programmable function according to 0.7 times the data rate. The variable cutoff frequency pre-modulation filter consists of a digital FIR filter, a DAC system and a tunable 2nd order LPF to meet the magnitude frequency response of an analog 7th order Bessel LPF. The attenuation requirements of three sub-blocks are generated by the frequency response analysis and the linear phase features are also taken into account for each stage. And the analog conversion part including a DAC system and a tunable 2nd order LPF is verified and calibrated using a tone generator.

We present a method for the objective quality evaluation of noise-reduced speech in wideband speech communication services, which utilize speech with a wider bandwidth (e.g., 7 kHz) than the usual telephone bandwidth. Experiments indicate that the amount of residual noise and the distortion of speech and noise, which are quality factors, influence the perceived quality degradation of noise-reduced speech. From the results, we observe the principal relationships between these quality factors and perceived speech quality. On the basis of these relationships, we propose a method that quantifies each quality factor in noise-reduced speech by analyzing signals that can be measured and assesses the overall perceived quality of noise-reduced speech using values of these quality factors. To verify the validity of the method, we perform a subjective listening test and compare subjective quality of noise-reduced speech with its estimation. In the test, we use various types of background noise and noise-reduction algorithms. The verification results indicate that the correlation between subjective quality and its objective estimation is sufficiently high regardless of the type of background noise and noise-reduction algorithm.

In mobile communications, the channel consists of many resolvable paths with different time delays, resulting in a severely frequency-selective fading channel. The frequency-domain equalization (FDE) can take advantage of the channel selectivity and improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of the single-carrier (SC) transmission. Recently, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) multiplexing is gaining much attention for achieving very high speed data transmissions with the limited bandwidth. Eigenbeam space division multiplexing (E-SDM) is known as one of MIMO multiplexing techniques. In this paper, we propose frequency-domain SC E-SDM for SC transmission. In frequency-domain SC E-SDM, the orthogonal transmission channels to transmit different data in parallel are constructed at each orthogonal frequency. At a receiver, FDE is used to suppress the inter-symbol interference (ISI). In this paper, the transmit power allocation and adaptive modulation based on the equivalent channel gains after performing FDE are applied. The BER performance of the frequency-domain SC E-SDM in a severe frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel is evaluated by computer simulation.

Multiply-stacked structures of Si quantum dots (Si-QDs) in gate oxide are attracting much attention because of their potential importance to improve retention characteristics in a high density charge storage. In this work, we have fabricated 6-fold stacked Si-QDs with 2 nm-thick SiO2 interlayers, whose areal dot density and average dot size were 5.71011 cm-2 in each dot layer and 5 nm in height, and studied progress on electron distribution in 6-fold stacked Si-QDs with 2 nm-thick SiO2 interlayers from the measurements of temporal changes in the surface potential after electron charging and discharging locally at room temperature using an AFM/Kelvin probe technique in clean room air. First, by scanning an area of 22 µm2 with the AFM tip biased at +3 V with respect to the substrate in a tapping mode, the area was negatively charged due to electron injection from the substrate to the dot through the bottom tunnel oxide and subsequently, the central part of 100100 nm2 in the pre-charged area was scanned with the tip biased at -3 V to emit the electrons from the Si-QDs to the substrate. As a result, the negative charging level was markedly reduced in the central part in comparison to its peripheral region. And then, the surface potential of the negatively-charged peripheral region was decay monotonously with time as a result of progressive electron tunneling to the substrate. In contrast to this, the temporal change in the surface potential of the central part shows that the electron charging proceeds with time until the surface potential becomes almost the same as that in the peripheral region. This result can be interpreted in terms of lateral spreading of electrons stored in the Si-QDs layer due to the potential difference between the central part and its peripheral region more negatively charged.

Code acquisition performance in the Direct-Sequence Code-Division Multiple-Access (DS/CDMA) communication system is strongly related to the quality of the communication systems. The performance is assessed by (i) code acquisition time; (ii) precision; and (iii) complexity for implementation. This paper applies the method of maximum likelihood (ML) to estimation of propagation delay in DS/CDMA communications, and proposes a low-complexity method for code acquisition. First, a DS/CDMA system model and properties of outputs with a passive matched-filter receiver are reviewed, and a statistical problem in code acquisition is mentioned. Second, an error-controllable code acquisition method based on the maximum likelihood is discussed. Third, a low-complexity ML code acquisition method is proposed. It is shown that the code acquisition time with the low-complexity method is about 1.5 times longer than that with the original ML method, e.g. 13 data periods under 4.96 dB.