An unsupervised adaptive signal processing method of principal components analysis (PCA) neural networks (NN) based on signal eigen-analysis is proposed to permit the eigenstructure analysis of lower signal to noise ratios (SNR) direct sequence spread spectrum (DS) signals. The objective of eigenstructure analysis is to estimate the pseudo noise (PN) of DS signals blindly. The received signal is firstly sampled and divided into non-overlapping signal vectors according to a temporal window, which duration is two periods of PN sequence. Then an autocorrelation matrix is computed and accumulated by these signal vectors one by one. Lastly, the PN sequence can be estimated by the principal eigenvector of autocorrelation matrix. Since the duration of temporal window is two periods of PN sequence, the PN sequence can be reconstructed by the first principal eigenvector only. Additionally, the eigen-analysis method becomes inefficient when the estimated PN sequence is long. We can use an unsupervised adaptive method of PCA NN to realize the PN sequence estimation from lower SNR input DS-SS signals effectively.

In wireless local area networks (WLANs), the necessity of quality-of-service (QoS) control for uplink flows is increasing because interactive applications are becoming more popular. Fairness between flows transmitted by stations with different physical transmission rates must be ensured in QoS control for link-adaptive WLANs, which are widely used nowadays. We propose a novel distributed access scheme called QC-DCA to satisfy these requirements. QC-DCA adaptively controls the parameters of carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). QC-DCA has two QoS control functions: guarantee and classification. QC-DCA guarantees target throughputs and packet delays by quickly adjusting CSMA/CA parameters. In QoS classification, the difference of throughputs and packet delays between different QoS classes is maintained. These two functions allow QC-DCA to suppress the unfairness caused by differences of transmission rates in the physical layer. We evaluated the throughput and delay performances of our scheme using computer simulations. The results show the viability of our scheme.

A new method to reduce power consumption of a linear transconductor is proposed in this paper. The minimum tail current for the operation of the transconductor is supplied by a new current source circuit. The proposed circuit is based on a dynamic biasing current technique. Results of SPICE simulation show that the proposed technique is very effective to reduce power consumption of the transconductor.

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is attracting a lot of attentions due to its extremely small feature sizes and ultra low power consumption. Up to now several designs using QCA technology have been proposed. However, we found not all of the designs function properly. Further, no general design guidelines have been proposed so far. A straightforward extension of a simple functional design pattern may fail. This makes designing a large scale circuits using QCA technology an extremely time-consuming process. In this paper we show several critical vulnerabilities in the structures of primitive QCA gates and QCA interconnects, and propose a disciplinary guideline to prevent any additional plausible but malfunctioning QCA designs.

Recently, voice over WLAN has become an attractive service, and it is expected to be the most popular application in the near future due to its low cost and easy deployment. It has been reported that there occurs unfairness between downlink and uplink in the 802.11 WLAN. This is mainly caused by CSMA/CA employed in DCF. All stations including an AP fairly compete for shared wireless medium. Thus, in particular, the unfairness has an adverse impact on bi-directional voice calls. Downlink voice connections become a primary factor to limit voice capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel medium access protocol, so called DCFmm, in order to improve QoS of downlink voice traffic as well as fairness between bi-directional voice connections. DCFmm is designed to enhance 802.11 DCF, and is fully compatible with the legacy DCF. In addition, it requires only protocol modifications of an AP. Thus, it can be easily implemented into existing 802.11 WLANs. DCFmm is compared with two conventional techniques through computer simulations. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed DCFmm can improve fairness between downlink and uplink, and consequently, support larger number of voice calls than DCF.

A new control scheme is proposed to improve the system performance for discrete-time fuzzy systems by tuning control grade functions using neural networks. According to a systematic method of constructing the exact Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model, the system uncertainty is considered to affect the membership functions. Then, the grade functions, resulting from the membership functions of the control rules, are tuned by a back-propagation network. On the other hand, the feedback gains of the control rules are determined by solving a set of LMIs which satisfy sufficient conditions of the closed-loop stability. As a result, both stability guarantee and better performance are concluded. The scheme applied to a truck-trailer system is verified by satisfactory simulation results.

Recently, the necessity of interconnection between wired Grid and wireless networks has grown up. In wireless Grid, an efficient resource management is essential in order to solve the problem of unreliability caused by intermittency of wireless since mission-critical service like e-Health is expected to be a main application in wireless Grid. In this letter, we consider replica management to provide a reliable resource management and computing, and propose Surrogate integrated PQRM (S-PQRM) architecture with cost adaptive replica management scheme. Through the theoretical analysis and simulation, we show a reliable and cost adaptive replica management scheme in aspects of reliability and cost performance within budget-constrained application.

This paper deals with graph colouring games, an example of pseudo-telepathy, in which two players can convince a verifier that a graph G is c-colourable where c is less than the chromatic number of the graph. They win the game if they convince the verifier. It is known that the players cannot win if they share only classical information, but they can win in some cases by sharing entanglement. The smallest known graph where the players win in the quantum setting, but not in the classical setting, was found by Galliard, Tapp and Wolf and has 32,768 vertices. It is a connected component of the Hadamard graph GN with N=c=16. Their protocol applies only to Hadamard graphs where N is a power of 2. We propose a protocol that applies to all Hadamard graphs. Combined with a result of Frankl, this shows that the players can win on any induced subgraph of G12 having 1609 vertices, with c=12. Moreover combined with a result of Godsil and Newman, our result shows that all Hadamard graphs GN (N ≥ 12) and c=N yield pseudo-telepathy games.

We deal with quadratic semi-assignment problems with symmetric distances. This symmetry reduces the number of variables in its mixed integer programming formulation. We investigate a polytope arising from the problem, and obtain some basic polyhedral properties, the dimension, the affine hull, and certain facets through an isomorphic projection. We also present a class of facets.

A novel blind channel estimation scheme is proposed for OFDM systems employing PSK modulation. This scheme minimizes the number of possible channels by exploiting the constant modulus property, chooses a best fit over the possible channels by exploiting the finite alphabet property of information signals, and achieves competitive performance with low computational complexity. Results comparing the new scheme with the finite-alphabet based channel estimation are presented.

In this paper, a 2-D iteratively reweighted least squares lattice algorithm, which is robust to the outliers, is introduced and is applied to defect detection problem in textured images. First, the philosophy of using different optimization functions that results in weighted least squares solution in the theory of 1-D robust regression is extended to 2-D. Then a new algorithm is derived which combines 2-D robust regression concepts with the 2-D recursive least squares lattice algorithm. With this approach, whatever the probability distribution of the prediction error may be, small weights are assigned to the outliers so that the least squares algorithm will be less sensitive to the outliers. Implementation of the proposed iteratively reweighted least squares lattice algorithm to the problem of defect detection in textured images is then considered. The performance evaluation, in terms of defect detection rate, demonstrates the importance of the proposed algorithm in reducing the effect of the outliers that generally correspond to false alarms in classification of textures as defective or nondefective.

The quadrature component unbalance generated by a non-ideal component such as an imperfect 90-degree phase shifter is an inevitable physical phenomenon and leads to performance degradation in a practical coherent M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) transceiver. In this letter, we present an exact and general expression involving the one- and two-dimensional Gaussian Q-functions for the symbol error rate (SER) of MPSK with I/Q phase unbalance over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The SER expression provided here offers a convenient way to evaluate the performance of MPSK systems for various cases of practical interest.

The complexity of the optimal decoding for vector quantization (VQ) in code-division multiple access (CDMA) communications prohibits implementation. It was recently shown in [1] that a suboptimal scheme that combines a soft-output multiuser detector and individual VQ decoders provides a flexible tradeoff between decoder's complexity and performance. The work in [1], however, only considers an AWGN channel model. This paper extends the technique in [1] to a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel. Simulation results indicate that such a suboptimal decoder also performs very well over this type of channel.

Live streaming is delay sensitive and can tolerate some amount of loss. The QoS Multicast for Live Streaming (QMLS) Protocol, focuses on the characteristics of live streaming. It has been shown to improve the performance of live streaming multicast by reducing the end-to-end packet loss probability. However, the placement of active routers performing the QMLS function has not been discussed. This paper proposes a dynamic method to activate and deactivate routers in order to minimize the number of active routers for each QMLS-packet flow and discusses its parameters. The results of an evaluation show that the proposed method can reduce the number of active routers for each flow and adjust the active routers according to changes in the multicast tree.

In orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based wireless local area networks (WLANs), phase noise (PHN) and residual frequency offset (RFO) can cause the common phase error (CPE) and the inter-carrier interferences (ICI), which seriously degrade the performance of systems. In this letter, we propose a combined pilot symbol assisted and decision-directed channel estimation scheme based on the least-squares (LS) and the maximum-likelihood (ML) algorithms. Simulation results present that the proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of OFDM-based WLANs.

A new cell structure Power MOSFET, which exhibits a lower on-state resistance and lower gate charge than the conventional layout geometry, is proposed in this research. Vertical Power MOSFETs are generally designed by either squared (closed) cell or stripe (linear) cell geometry; each has its own advantages and drawbacks. Typically, closed cell design has lower on resistance but higher gate charge characteristics than the linear one. In this study, we propose, fabricate, and analyze a "wing cell" structure Power MOSFET, which can have lower on resistance and lower gate charge performances than the closed cell structure. In addition, the wing cell design can avoid the "closed concept" patents.

The recent burst growth of the Internet use overloads networking systems and degrades the quality of communications, e.g., bandwidth loss, packet drops, delay of responses, etc. To overcome such degradation of communication quality, the notion of Quality of Service (QoS) has received attention in practice. In general, QoS switches have several queues and each queue has several slots to store arriving packets. Since network traffic changes frequently, QoS switches need to control arriving packets to maximize the total priorities of transmitted packets, where the priorities are given by nonnegative values and correspond to the quality of service required to each packet. In this paper, we first derive the upper bounds for the competitive ratio of multi-queue preemptive QoS problem with priority between 1/α and 1, i.e., for any α ≥ 1, the algorithm TLH is (3-1/α)-competitive. This is a generalization of known results--for the case that packets have only priority 1 (α =1), the algorithm GREEDY (or TLH) is 2-competitive; for the case that packets have priorities between 0 and 1 (α = ∞), the algorithm TLH is 3-competitive. Then we consider the lower bounds for the competitive ratio of multi-queue preemptive QoS problem with priority between 0 and 1, and show that the competitive ratio of any multi-queue preemptive QoS algorithm is at least 1.514.

The protein threading problem with profiles is known to be efficiently solvable using dynamic programming. In this paper, we consider a variant of the protein threading problem with profiles in which constraints on distances between residues are given. We prove that protein threading with profiles and constraints is NP-hard. Moreover, we show a strong hardness result on the approximation of an optimal threading satisfying all the constraints. On the other hand, we develop two practical algorithms: CLIQUETHREAD and BBDPTHREAD. CLIQUETHREAD reduces the threading problem to the maximum edge-weight clique problem, whereas BBDPTHREAD combines dynamic programming and branch-and-bound techniques. We perform computational experiments using protein structure data in PDB (Protein Data Bank) using simulated distance constraints. The results show that constraints are useful to improve the alignment accuracy of the target sequence and the template structure. Moreover, these results also show that BBDPTHREAD is in general faster than CLIQUETHREAD for larger size proteins whereas CLIQUETHREAD is useful if there does not exist a feasible threading.

In STS-based mapping, it is necessary to obtain the correct order of probes in a DNA sequence from a given set of fragments or an equivalently a hybridization matrix A. It is well-known that the problem is formulated as the combinatorial problem of obtaining a permutation of A's columns so that the resulting matrix has a consecutive-one property. If the data (the hybridization matrix) is error free and includes enough information, then the above column order uniquely determines the correct order of the probes. Unfortunately this does not hold if the data include errors, and this has been a popular research target in computational biology. Even if there is no error, ambiguities in the probe order may still remain. This in fact happens because of the lack of some information regarding the data, but almost no further investigation has previously been made. In this paper, we define a measure of such imperfectness of the data as the minimum amount of the additional fragments that are needed to uniquely fix the probe order. Polynomial-time algorithms to compute such additional fragments of the minimum cost are presented. A computer simulation using genes of human chromosome 20 is also noted.

Orthogonal Arrays (OAs) have been playing important roles in the field of experimental design. It has been known that OAs are closely related to error-correcting codes. Therefore, many OAs can be constructed from error-correcting codes. But these OAs are suitable for only cases that equal interaction effects can be assumed, for example, all two-factor interaction effects. Since these cases are rare in experimental design, we cannot say that OAs from error-correcting codes are practical. In this paper, we define OAs with unequal strength. In terms of our terminology, OAs from error-correcting codes are OAs with equal strength. We show that OAs with unequal strength are closer to practical OAs than OAs with equal strength. And we clarify the relation between OAs with unequal strength and unequal error-correcting codes. Finally, we propose some construction methods of OAs with unequal strength from unequal error-correcting codes.