Range estimation based on time of arrival (TOA) is becoming increasingly important with the emergence of location-based applications and next-generation location-aware wireless sensor networks. For radar and positioning systems, chirp signals have primarily been used due to their inborn signal properties for decomposition. Recently, chirp signal has been selected as the baseline standard of ISO/IEC 24730-5 and IEEE 802.15.4a in 2.4GHz, organized for the development of a real-time accurate positioning system. When estimating the TOA of the received signals in multipath channel, the super-resolution algorithms, known as estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT), multiple signal classification method (MUSIC) and matrix pencil (MP), are preferred due to their superiority in decomposing the received paths. For the super-resolution algorithm-based TOA estimation of chirp signals, the received chirp signals must be transformed into a sinusoidal form for the super-resolution algorithm. The conventional transformation, the de-chirping technique, changes the received chirp signals to sinusoids so that the super-resolution algorithms can estimate the TOA of the received chirp signals through a frequency estimation of the transformed sinusoids. In practice, the initial timing synchronizer at receiver tries to find the maximum energy point at which the received paths are overlapped maximally. At this time, the conventional de-chirping yields lossy transformed sinusoids for the first arrival path from the received samples synchronized to the maximum energy point. The first arrival path is not involved in the transformed sinusoids with the conventional transformation, leading to performance degradation. However, the proposed energy efficient time-frequency transformation achieves lossless transformation by using the extended reference chirp signals. The proposed transformation is incorporated with MUSIC-based TOA estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed transformation is analyzed and verified. The root mean squared error (RMSE) of the proposed transformation is compared with Cramer-Rao lower bound and those for the conventional algorithms such as super-resolution, ESPRIT and matrix pencil algorithm in multipath channel.

The complexity of the graph isomorphism problem for trapezoid graphs has been open over a decade. This paper shows that the problem is GI-complete. More precisely, we show that the graph isomorphism problem is GI-complete for comparability graphs of partially ordered sets with interval dimension 2 and height 3. In contrast, the problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time for comparability graphs of partially ordered sets with interval dimension at most 2 and height at most 2.

This paper extends our previously proposed non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme to the base station (BS) cooperative multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cellular downlink for future radio access. The proposed NOMA scheme employs intra-beam superposition coding of a multiuser signal at the transmitter and the spatial filtering of inter-beam interference followed by the intra-beam successive interference canceller (SIC) at the user terminal receiver. The intra-beam SIC cancels out the inter-user interference within a beam. This configuration achieves reduced overhead for the downlink reference signaling for channel estimation at the user terminal in the case of non-orthogonal user multiplexing and enables the use of the SIC receiver in the MIMO downlink. The transmitter beamforming (precoding) matrix is controlled based on open loop-type random beamforming using a block-diagonalized beamforming matrix, which is very efficient in terms of the amount of feedback information from the user terminal. Simulation results show that the proposed NOMA scheme with block-diagonalized random beamforming in BS cooperative multiuser MIMO and the intra-beam SIC achieves better system-level throughput than orthogonal multiple access (OMA), which is assumed in LTE-Advanced. We also show that BS cooperative operation along with the proposed NOMA further enhances the cell-edge user throughput gain which implies better user fairness and universal connectivity.

An electro-optic (EO) modulator integrated with the microwave planar circuit directly formed on a LiNbO3 (LN) substrate for low frequency-chirp performance and compact configuration is introduced. Frequency chirp of EO intensity modulators was investigated and a dual-electrode Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulator combined with a microwave rat-race (RR) circuit was considered for the low-chirp modulation. The RR circuit, which operates as a 180-degree hybrid, was designed on a z-cut LN substrate to create two modulation signals of the same amplitude in anti-phase with each other from a single input signal. Output ports of the RR were connected to the modulation electrodes on the substrate. The two signals of the equal amplitude drive two phase modulation parts of the modulator so that the symmetric interference are realized to obtain intensity modulation of low frequency-chirp. The modulator was designed and fabricated on a single LN substrate for around 10 GHz modulation frequencies and 1550 nm light wavelength. The chirp parameters were measured to be less than 0.2 in the frequency range between 8 and 12 GHz. By compensating imbalance of the light power splitting in the waveguide MZ interferometer the chirp could be reduced even more.

This paper investigates a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) combined with single user MIMO (SU-MIMO) for future LTE (Long-Term Evolution) enhancements. In particular, we propose practical schemes to efficiently combine NOMA with open-loop SU-MIMO (Transmission Mode 3: TM3) and closed-loop SU-MIMO (Transmission Mode 4: TM4) specified in LTE. The goal is also to clarify the performance gains of NOMA combined with SU-MIMO transmission, taking into account the LTE radio interface such as frequency-domain scheduling, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), and NOMA specific functionalities such as, multi-user pairing/ordering, transmit power allocation and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver side. Based on computer simulations, we evaluate NOMA link-level performance and show that the impact of error propagation associated with SIC is marginal when the power ratio of cell-edge and cell-center users is sufficiently large. In addition, we evaluate NOMA system-level performance gains for different granularities of scheduling and MCS (modulation and coding scheme) selection, for both genie-aided channel quality information (CQI) estimation and approximated CQI estimation, and using different number of power sets. Evaluation results show that NOMA combined with SU-MIMO can still provide a hefty portion of its expected gains even with approximated CQI estimation and limited number of power sets, and also when LTE compliant subband scheduling and wideband MCS is applied.

A quantum dot (QD) electro-absorption device was successfully developed with a highly stacked InAs/InGaAlAs QD structure. A 1.55-µm waveband electro-absorption effect and a quantum confined Stark effect of approximately 22 meV under the application of a 214-kV/cm reverse bias electric field are clearly observed in the developed QD device.

With the rapid increase of various uses of wireless communications in modern life, the high microwave and millimeter wave frequency bands are attracting much attention. However, the existing databases on above 6GHz radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic (EM) field exposure of biological bodies are obviously insufficient. An in-vivo research project on local and whole-body exposure of rats to RF-EM fields above 6GHz was started in Japan in 2013. This study aims to perform a dosimetric design for the whole-body-average specific absorption rates (WBA-SARs) of unconstrained rats exposed to 6GHz RF-EM fields in a reverberation chamber (RC). The required input power into the RC is clarified using a two-step evaluation method in order to achieve a target exposure level in rats. The two-step method, which incorporates the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) numerical solutions with electric field measurements in an RC exposure system, is used as an evaluation method to determine the whole-body exposure level in the rats. In order to verify the validity of the two-step method, we use S-parameter measurements inside the RC to experimentally derive the WBA-SARs with rat-equivalent phantoms and then compare those with the FDTD-calculated ones. It was shown that the difference between the two-step method and the S-parameter measurements is within 1.63dB, which reveals the validity and usefulness of the two-step technique.

In deep-submicron era, interconnection delays are not negligible even in high-level synthesis and regular-distributed-register architectures (RDR architectures) have been proposed to cope with this problem. In this paper, we propose a high-level synthesis algorithm using operation chainings which reduces the overall latency targeting RDR architectures. Our algorithm consists of three steps: The first step enumerates candidate operations for chaining. The second step introduces maximal chaining distance (MCD), which gives the maximal allowable inter-island distance on RDR architecture between chaining candidate operations. The last step performs list-scheduling and binding simultaneously based on the results of the two preceding steps. Our algorithm enumerates feasible chaining candidates and selects the best ones for RDR architecture. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm reduces the latency by up to 40.0% compared to the original approach, and by up to 25.0% compared to a conventional approach. Our algorithm also reduces the number of registers and the number of multiplexers compared to the conventional approaches in some cases.

Recently, high-level synthesis (HLS) techniques for FPGA designs are required in various applications such as computerized stock tradings and reconfigurable network processings. In HLS for FPGA designs, we need to consider module floorplan and reduce multiplexer's cost concurrently. In this paper, we propose a floorplan-driven HLS algorithm for multiplexer reduction targeting FPGA designs. By utilizing distributed-register architectures called HDR, we can easily consider module floorplan in HLS. In order to reduce multiplexer's cost, we propose two novel binding methods called datapath-oriented scheduling/FU binding and datapath-oriented register binding. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm can realize FPGA designs which reduce the number of slices by up to 47% and latency by up to 22% compared with conventional approaches while the number of required control steps is almost the same.

With the development and diverse use of wireless radio terminals, it is necessary to estimate the specific absorption rate (SAR) of the human body from such devices under various exposure situations. In particular, tablet computers may be used for a long time while placed near the abdomen. There has been insufficient evaluation of the SAR for the human body from tablet computers. Therefore, we investigated the SAR of various configurations of a commercial tablet computer using a numerical model with the anatomical structures of Japanese males and females, respectively. We find that the 10-g-averaged SAR of the tablet computer is strongly altered by the tablet's orientation, i.e., from -7.3dB to -22.6dB. When the tablet computer is moved parallel to the height direction, the relative standard deviations of the 10-g averaged SAR for the male and female models are within 40%. In addition, those for the different tilts of the computer are within 20%. The fluctuations of the 10-g-averaged SAR for the seated human models are within ±1.5dB in all cases.

A new approach to reconstructing antenna far-field patterns from the missing part of the pattern is presented in this paper. The antenna far-field pattern can be reconstructed by utilizing the iterative Hilbert transform, which is based on the relationship between the real and imaginary part of the Hilbert transform. A moving average filter is used to reduce the errors in the restored signal as well as the computation load. Under the constraint of the causality of the current source in space, we could successfully reconstruct the data. Several examples dealing with line source antennas and antenna arrays are simulated to illustrate the applicability of this approach.

Recently a compact code of mosaic floorplans with ƒ inner face was proposed by He. The length of the code is 3ƒ-3 bits and asymptotically optimal. In this paper, we propose a new code of mosaic floorplans with ƒ inner faces including k boundary faces. The length of our code is at most $3f - rac{k}{2} - 1$ bits. Hence our code is shorter than or equal to the code by He, except for few small floorplans with k=ƒ≤3. Coding and decoding can be done in O(ƒ) time.

In cognitive radio (CR), superposition cooperative spectrum sensing (SPCSS) is able to offer a much improved sensing reliability compared to individual sensing. Because of the differences in sensing channel condition, the reporting order for each cognitive radio user (CU) will highly affect the sensing performance of the network. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to assign the best reporting order to each CU in order to maximize sensing performance under SPCSS. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme can obtain the same performance as the optimal scheme.

This paper proposes a novel blind adaptive array scheme with subcarrier transmission power assignment (STPA) for spectrum superposing in cognitive radio networks. The Eigenvector Beamspace Adaptive Array (EBAA) is known to be one of the blind adaptive array algorithms that can suppress inter-system interference without any channel state information (CSI). However, EBAA has difficulty in suppressing interference signals whose Signal to Interference power Ratio (SIR) values at the receiver are around 0dB. With the proposed scheme, the ST intentionally provides a level difference between subcarriers. At the receiver side, the 1st eigenvector of EBAA is applied to the received signals of the subcarrier assigned higher power and the 2nd eigenvector is applied to those assigned lower power. In order to improve interference suppression performance, we incorporate Beamspace Constant Modulus Algorithm (BSCMA) into EBAA (E-BSCMA). Additionally, STPA is effective in reducing the interference experienced by the primary system. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme can suppress interference signals received with SIR values of around 0dB while improving operational SIR for the primary system. It can enhance the co-existing region of 2 systems that share a spectrum.

For k ≥ 3, a convex geometric graph is called k-locally outerplanar if no path of length k intersects itself. In [D. Boutin, Convex Geometric Graphs with No Short Self-intersecting Path, Congressus Numerantium 160 (2003) 205-214], Boutin stated the results of the degeneracy for 3-locally outerplanar graphs. Later, in [D. Boutin, Structure and Properties of Locally Outerplanar Graphs, Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing 60 (2007) 169-180], a structural property on k-locally outerplanar graphs was proposed. These results are based on the existence of “minimal corner pairs”. In this paper, we show that a “minimal corner pair” may not exist and give a counterexample to disprove the structural property. Furthermore, we generalize the result on the degeneracy with respect to k-locally outerplanar graphs.

Gallium oxide is expected as a channel material for thin film transistors. In the conventional technologies, gallium oxide has been tried to be fabricated by atomic layer deposition (ALD) at high temperatures from 100--450$^{circ}$C, although the room-temperature (RT) growth has not been developed. In this work, we developed the RT ALD of gallium oxide by using a remote plasma technique. We studied trimethylgallium (TMG) adsorption and its oxidization on gallium oxide surfaces at RT by infrared absorption spectroscopy (IRAS). Based on the adsorption and oxidization characteristics, we designed the room temperature ALD of Ga$_{2}$O$_{3}$. The IRAS indicated that TMG adsorbs on the gallium oxide surface by consuming the adsorption sites of surface hydroxyl groups even at RT and the remote plasma-excited water and oxygen vapor is effective in oxidizing the TMG adsorbed surface and regeneration of the adsorption sites for TMG. We successfully prepared Ga$_{2}$O$_{3}$ films on Si substrates at RT with a growth per cycle of 0.055,nm/cycle.

Nitrogen adsorption on thermally cleaned Si(100) surfaces by pure and plasma excited NH$_{3}$ is investigated by extit{in situ} IR absorption spectroscopy and ex-situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy with various temperatures from RT (25$^{circ}$C) to 800$^{circ}$C and with a treatment time of 5,min. The nitrogen coverage after the treatment varies according to the treatment temperature for both pure and plasma excited NH$_{3}$. In case of the pure NH$_{3}$, the nitrogen coverage is saturated as low as 0.13--0.25 mono layer (ML) while the growth of the nitride film commenced at 550$^{circ}$C. For the plasma excited NH$_{3}$, the saturation coverage was measured at 0.54,ML at RT and it remained unincreased from RT to 550$^{circ}$C. This indicates that the plasma excited NH$_{3}$ enhances the nitrogen adsorption near at RT. It is found that main species of N is Si$_{2}=$ NH in case of the plasma excited NH$_{3}$ at RT while the pure NH$_{3}$ treatment gives rise to the Si--NH$_{2}$ passivation with Si--H at RT. We discuss the mechanism of the nitrogen adsorption on Si(100) surfaces with the plasma excited NH$_{3}$ in comparison with the study on the pure NH$_{3}$ treatment.

This paper proposes a robust superpixel-based tracker via multiple-instance learning, which exploits the importance of instances and mid-level features captured by superpixels for object tracking. We first present a superpixels-based appearance model, which is able to compute the confidences of the object and background. Most importantly, we introduce the sample importance into multiple-instance learning (MIL) procedure to improve the performance of tracking. The importance for each instance in the positive bag is defined by accumulating the confidence of all the pixels within the corresponding instance. Furthermore, our tracker can help recover the object from the drifting scene using the appearance model based on superpixels when the drift occurs. We retain the first (k-1) frames' information during the updating process to alleviate drift to some extent. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed tracker, six video sequences of different challenging situations are tested. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed tracker has more robust and accurate performance than six ones representing the state-of-the-art.

The indoor fingerprinting localization technology has received more attention in recent years due to the increasing demand of the indoor location based services (LBSs). However, a high quality of the LBS requires a positioning solution with high accuracy and low computational complexity. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique, which emulates the social behavior of a flock of birds to search for the optimal solution of a special problem, can provide attractive performance in terms of accuracy, computational efficiency and convergence rate. In this paper, we adopt the PSO algorithm to estimate the location information. First, our system establishes a Bayesian-rule based objective function. It then applies PSO to identify the optimal solution. We also propose a hybrid access point (AP) selection method to improve the accuracy, and analyze the effects of the number and the initial positions of particles on the localization performance. In order to mitigate the estimation error, we use the Kalman Filter to update the initial estimated location via the PSO algorithm to track the trail of the mobile user. Our analysis indicates that our method can reduce the computational complexity and improve the real-time performance. Numerous experiments also demonstrate that our proposed localization and tracking system achieve higher localization accuracy than existing systems.

This paper presents our investigation of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) as a novel and promising power-domain user multiplexing scheme for future radio access. Based on information theory, we can expect that NOMA with a successive interference canceller (SIC) applied to the receiver side will offer a better tradeoff between system efficiency and user fairness than orthogonal multiple access (OMA), which is widely used in 3.9 and 4G mobile communication systems. This improvement becomes especially significant when the channel conditions among the non-orthogonally multiplexed users are significantly different. Thus, NOMA can be expected to efficiently exploit the near-far effect experienced in cellular environments. In this paper, we describe the basic principle of NOMA in both the downlink and uplink and then present our proposed NOMA scheme for the scenario where the base station is equipped with multiple antennas. Simulation results show the potential system-level throughput gains of NOMA relative to OMA.