A design of a low-power CMOS ring oscillator for an application to a 13.56 MHz clock generator in an implantable RFID tag is proposed. The circuit is based on a novel voltage inverter, which is an improved version of the conventional current-source loaded inverter. The proposed circuit enables low-power operation and low sensitivity of the oscillation frequency, fOSC, to decay of the power supply VDD. By employing a gm-boosting subcircuit, power dissipation is decreased to 49 µW at fOSC=13.56 MHz. The sensitivity of fOSC to VDD is reduced to -0.02 at fOSC=13.56 MHz thanks to the use of composite high-impedance current sources.

Inspired by the success of the low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in the field of error-control coding, in this paper we propose transforming the downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output scheduling problem into an LDPC-like problem using the normal graph. Based on the normal graph framework, soft information, which indicates the probability that each user will be scheduled to transmit packets at the access point through a specified angle-frequency sub-channel, is exchanged among the local processors to iteratively optimize the multiuser transmission schedule. Computer simulations show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently schedule simultaneous multiuser transmission which then increases the overall channel utilization and reduces the average packet delay.

In this study, we introduce a software pipeline to track feature points across endoscopic video frames. It deals with the common problems of low contrast and uneven illumination that afflict endoscopic imaging. In particular, irregular feature trajectories are eliminated to improve quality. The structure of soft tissue is determined by an iterative factorization method based on collection of tracked features. A shape updating mechanism is proposed in order to yield scale-invariant structures. Experimental results show that the tracking method produced good tracking performance and increased the number of tracked feature trajectories. The real scale and structure of the target scene was successfully estimated, and the recovered structure is more accuracy than the conventional method.

We address pilot-aided channel estimation for a flat-fading spatially-correlated MIMO system, which employing Uniform Linear Arrays (ULA) on dual side and working in sparse scattering (multipath) environment. In case of sparse scattering, channel matrix and spatial correlation of flat-fading MIMO systems are parameterized by structure of multipaths, which is represented as Direction of Arrivals (DOAs), Direction of Departures (DODs) and complex path fading of each path. Based on this and block-fading property of channel, we design a channel estimation method via estimating multipath parameters using ESPRIT-like DOA-Matrix method which exploits shift-invariance property of ULA. The proposed method is able to obtain improved Mean-Square-Error performance than Least-Square method without prior information of spatial correlation.

The HITS algorithm proposed by Kleinberg is one of the representative methods of scoring Web pages by using hyperlinks. In the days when the algorithm was proposed, most of the pages given high score by the algorithm were really related to a given topic, and hence the algorithm could be used to find related pages. However, the algorithm and the variants including Bharat's improved HITS, abbreviated to BHITS, proposed by Bharat and Henzinger cannot be used to find related pages any more on today's Web, due to an increase of spam links. In this paper, we first propose three methods to find "linkfarms," that is, sets of spam links forming a densely connected subgraph of a Web graph. We then present an algorithm, called a trust-score algorithm, to give high scores to pages which are not spam pages with a high probability. Combining the three methods and the trust-score algorithm with BHITS, we obtain several variants of the HITS algorithm. We ascertain by experiments that one of them, named TaN+BHITS using the trust-score algorithm and the method of finding linkfarms by employing name servers, is most suitable for finding related pages on today's Web. Our algorithms take time and memory no more than those required by the original HITS algorithm, and can be executed on a PC with a small amount of main memory.

Recently, there has been extensive research on resource allocation schemes for multicast services that would satisfy the requirements of multimedia traffic. Although several schemes have been proposed to improve the performance of individual multicast groups, it is not easy to achieve both throughput efficiency and user fairness. In this study, we propose a new multicast scheduling scheme for achieving proportional fair (PF) allocation in wireless cellular systems. The basic idea of PF is to schedule the user whose corresponding instantaneous channel quality is the highest relative to the average channel condition over a given time scale. We first extend the PF metric to the extent that the scheduler can reflect the user's varying channel gain, and fairness, not only in the unicast case, but also in multicast transmissions. A multicast PF scheme maximizes the summation of the logarithmic average rate of all multicasting users. Thus, it improves the fairness to mobile users when compared to max-rate allocation, because the logarithmic rate gives more weight to lower rate users, while achieving high throughput. Moreover, the proposed scheme is less complex than max-rate allocation.

The historical review of Taiwan's researching activities on the features of PECVD grown SiOx are also included to realize the performance of Si nanocrystal based MOSLED made by such a Si-rich SiOx film with embedded Si nanocrystals on conventional Si substrate. A surface nano-roughened Si substrate with interfacial Si nano-pyramids at SiOx/Si interface are also reviewed, which provide the capabilities of enhancing the surface roughness induced total-internal-reflection relaxation and the Fowler-Nordheim tunneling based carrier injection. These structures enable the light emission and extraction from a metal-SiOx-Si MOSLED.

In this paper, an automatic identification method based on frequency discrimination is proposed. The proposed method can be used when the received signal is a constant envelope modulation scheme. To test the proposed method PSK and FSK are considered. Using computer simulations, the performance of the proposed method was evaluated and found to be able to distinguish between PSK and FSK well even in the presence of noise.

Video multicast over wireless medium has gained increasing popularity in a wide range of applications, such as video-on-demand and group video conferencing. With mobile ad hoc networks emerging as a promising solution for future ubiquitous communications, supporting reliable video multicast over mobile ad hoc networks is a timely research topic. In this paper we tackle this issue by using multiple tree multicast routing protocol. Specifically, we introduce an extension to the Multicast Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (MAODV) routing protocol to construct two optimally disjoint trees in a single routine. The extended protocol is called Multiple Tree Multicast Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (MT-MAODV) routing protocol. In order to distribute the video evenly and independently between these disjoint trees, the Multiple Description Coding (MDC) scheme is used for video coding. Simulation shows that the proposed protocol demonstrates video multicast with better quality than the conventional video multicast using a single tree only.

Canetti et al. [5] showed that there exist signature and encryption schemes that are secure in the random oracle (RO) model, but for which any implementation of the RO (by a single function or a function ensemble) results in insecure schemes. Their result greatly motivates the design of cryptographic schemes that are secure in the standard computational model. This paper gives some new results on the RO methodology. First, we give the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a signature scheme that is secure in the RO model but where, for any implementation of the RO, the resulting scheme is insecure. Next, we show that this condition induces a signature scheme that is insecure in the RO model, but that there is an implementation of the RO that makes the scheme secure.

In this paper, we propose a method that recovers a smooth high-resolution image from several blurred and roughly quantized low-resolution images. For compensation of the quantization effect we introduce measurements of smoothness, Huber function that is originally used for suppression of block noises in a JPEG compressed image [Schultz & Stevenson '94] and a smoothed version of total variation. With a simple operator that approximates the convex projection onto constraint set defined for each quantized image [Hasegawa et al. '05], we propose a method that minimizes these cost functions, which are smooth convex functions, over the intersection of all constraint sets, i.e. the set of all images satisfying all quantization constraints simultaneously, by using hybrid steepest descent method [Yamada & Ogura '04]. Finally in the numerical example we compare images derived by the proposed method, Projections Onto Convex Sets (POCS) based conventinal method, and generalized proposed method minimizing energy of output of Laplacian.

In this paper, the effects of Bragg scattering on ultra-wideband (UWB) signal transmission from periodic surfaces are reported. First, the frequency dispersive property of Bragg scattering is theoretically and experimentally confirmed. Next, the transfer function of both specular path and Bragg scattering are extracted. Then direct sequence UWB (DS-UWB) transmission simulations are conducted by using a raised cosine pulse that occupied 3.1 to 10.6 GHz and a Gaussian pulse that occupied 8.75 to 9.25 GHz. Finally, the effects of Bragg scattering on UWB systems are discussed.

Due to the proliferation of mobile devices connected to the Internet, implementing a secure and practical Mobile IP has become an important goal. A mobile IP can not work properly without authentication between the mobile node (MN), the home agent (HA) and the foreign agent (FA). In this paper, we propose a practical Mobile IP authentication protocol that uses public key cryptography only during the initial authentication. The proposed scheme is compatible with the conventional Mobile IP protocol and provides scalability against the number of MN's. We also show that the proposed protocol offers secure operation.

In this paper, a novel cache conscious indexing technique based on space partitioning trees is proposed. Many researchers investigated efficient cache conscious indexing techniques which improve retrieval performance of in-memory database management system recently. However, most studies considered data partitioning and targeted fast information retrieval. Existing data partitioning-based index structures significantly degrade performance due to the redundant accesses of overlapped spaces. Specially, R-tree-based index structures suffer from the propagation of MBR (Minimum Bounding Rectangle) information by updating data frequently. In this paper, we propose an in-memory space partitioning index structure for optimal cache utilization. The proposed index structure is compared with the existing index structures in terms of update performance, insertion performance and cache-utilization rate in a variety of environments. The results demonstrate that the proposed index structure offers better performance than existing index structures.

Modern applications of pattern recognition generate very large amounts of data, which require large computational effort to process. However, the majority of the methods intended for large-scale problems aim to merely adapt standard classification methods without considering if those algorithms are appropriated for large-scale problems. CombNET-II was one of the first methods specifically proposed for such kind of a task. Recently, an extension of this model, named CombNET-III, was proposed. The main modifications over the previous model was the substitution of the expert networks by Support Vectors Machines (SVM) and the development of a general probabilistic framework. Although the previous model's performance and flexibility were improved, the low accuracy of the gating network was still compromising CombNET-III's classification results. In addition, due to the use of SVM based experts, the computational complexity is higher than CombNET-II. This paper proposes a new two-layered gating network structure that reduces the compromise between number of clusters and accuracy, increasing the model's performance with only a small complexity increase. This high-accuracy gating network also enables the removal the low confidence expert networks from the decoding procedure. This, in addition to a new faster strategy for calculating multiclass SVM outputs significantly reduced the computational complexity. Experimental results of problems with large number of categories show that the proposed model outperforms the original CombNET-III, while presenting a computational complexity more than one order of magnitude smaller. Moreover, when applied to a database with a large number of samples, it outperformed all compared methods, confirming the proposed model's flexibility.

This paper proposes a new partial channel state information (CSI) reporting method for spatial scheduling in TDD/MIMO systems. In the proposed method, a terminal transmits pilot signals using transmit beams which have large channel gains between the base station (BS) and the terminal. Then, the BS can obtain partial CSI through responses of the pilot signals. Furthermore, adaptive allocation of pilot signals is proposed, in which pilot signals for CSI reporting are adaptively allocated to terminals depending on the number of terminals. We evaluate system throughput of spatial scheduling under the partial CSI reporting from multiple terminals. Numerical results show that the proposed method reduces uplink signalling for CSI reporting effectively, keeping high system throughput of spatial scheduling.

At the behavioral level, large power savings are possible by shutting down unused operations, which is commonly referred to as power management. However, operation scheduling has a significant impact on the potential for power saving via power management. In this paper, we present an integer linear programming (ILP) model to formally formulate the simultaneous application of operation scheduling and power management in high level synthesis. Our objective is to maximize the power saving under both the timing constraints and the resource constraints. Note that our approach guarantees solving the problem optimally. Compared with previous work, experimental data consistently show that our approach has significant relative improvement in the power savings.

The combination of deliberate clipping and an adaptive symbol selection scheme (ASSS) can be used to reduce the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signals. The probability density function (pdf) of a sample's amplitude of an adaptively selected OFDM signal without over-sampling has been considered to be approximately equal to the Rayleigh pdf. In this letter, we derive the exact pdf showing the relationship between the probability distribution of the sample's amplitude and the number of candidate OFDM symbols for ASSS. The use of the newly derived pdf can measure the effect of deliberate clipping on the adaptively selected OFDM signal more accurately.

A transverse magnetic (TM) plane wave is diffracted by a periodic surface into discrete directions. However, only the reflection and no diffraction take place when the angle of incidence becomes a low grazing limit. On the other hand, the scattering occurs even at such a limit, if the periodic surface is finite in extent. To solve such contradiction, this paper deals with the scattering from a perfectly conductive sinusoidal surface with finite extent. By the undersampling approximation introduced previously, the total scattering cross section is numerically calculated against the angle of incidence for several corrugation widths up to more than 104 times of wavelength. It is then found that the total scattering cross section is linearly proportional to the corrugation width in general. But an exception takes place at a low grazing limit of incidence, where the total scattering cross section increases almost proportional to the square root of the corrugation width. This suggests that, when the corrugation width goes to infinity, the total scattering cross section diverges and the total scattering cross section per unit surface vanishes at a low grazing limit of incidence. Then, it is concluded that, at a low grazing limit of incidence, no diffraction takes place by a periodic surface with infinite extent and the scattering occurs from a periodic surface with finite extent.

We have derived the novel extended UTD (Uniform Geometrical Theory of Diffraction) solution and the novel modified UTD solution for the back scattering of an incident whispering gallery (WG) mode on the edge of a cylindrically curved conducting sheet. By comparing with the reference solution obtained from the integral representation of the scattered field by integrating numerically along the integration path, we have confirmed the validity and the utility of the novel asymptotic solutions proposed in the present study. It is shown that the extended UTD solution can be connected smoothly to the modified UTD solution on the geometrical boundary separating the edge-diffracted ray and the surface-diffracted ray.