It is predicted that there will be a high demand for video applications in future wireless networks including wireless ad hoc networks. However, supporting video applications over mobile ad hoc networks is more complicated than with other networks due to the lack of support from a preinstalled infrastructure. In this paper, we tackle this problem by adopting the concept of multipoint-to-point video transmission used in wire-line networks. A novel framework designed with features to accommodate the characteristics of ad hoc networks is presented. There are two key features in our proposal. First, Multiple Description Coding (MDC) scheme is used for video coding to reduce the redundancy by avoiding the transmission of duplicate video frames. Second, the routing protocol is expanded to include finding disjoint routes from video sources to the receiver so that a single link breakage or a single intermediate node failure affects transmission from only the minimum number of nodes. Furthermore, the use of disjoint routes also enables the workload to be distributed more evenly within the network. A simulation study was carried out using NS-2 to demonstrate the performance of the proposed mechanism. We show that the proposed mechanism outperforms conventional point-to-point transmission, especially under conditions of high mobility.

Bandwidth management over wired bottleneck links has been an effective way to utilize network resources. For the rapidly emerging IEEE 802.11b Wireless LAN (WLAN), the limited WLAN bandwidth becomes a new bottleneck and requires bandwidth management. Most possible existing solutions only exclusively focus on optimizing multimedia traffic, pure downlink or pure uplink fairness, or are incompatible with IEEE 802.11b. This study proposes a cooperative deficit round robin (co-DRR), an IEEE 802.11b-compatible host-based fair scheduling algorithm based on the deficit round robin (DRR) and distributed-DRR (DDRR) schemes, to make the uplink and downlink quantum calculations cooperate to simultaneously control uplink and downlink bandwidth. Co-DRR uses the standard PCF mode to utilize the contention-free period to compensate for the unfairness in the contention period. Numerical results demonstrate that: co-DRR can scale up to 100 mobile hosts even under high bit error rate (0.0001) while simultaneously achieving uplink/downlink long-term fairness (CoV<0.01) among competing mobile hosts.

A novel type Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA), called double-pulse BOTDA (DP-BOTDA), is proposed for measuring distributed strain and temperature in a fiber with a centimeter spatial resolution. The DP-BOTDA system transmits a double-pulsed light instead of a conventional single-pulsed light into a fiber to interact with a counter-propagating continuous-wave light through the induced acoustic wave in the fiber. The interference between acoustic waves induced by the front and rear pulses of the double-pulsed light produces broad but oscillatory Brillouin gain spectra that make it possible to measure the Brillouin frequency shift accurately despite the very narrow pulse width. Our numerical simulation, which includes an estimation of the signal-to-noise ratio of the system, shows that it is possible to measure the distributed Brillouin frequency shift with a spatial resolution of 4 cm and accuracies of 1-2 MHz for a 5-km long fiber.

Non-malleability is an important security property of commitment schemes. The property means security against the man-in-the-middle attack, and it is defined and proved in the simulation paradigm using the corresponding simulator. Many known non-malleable commitment schemes have the common drawback that their corresponding simulators do not work in a straight-line manner, requires rewinding of the adversary. Due to this fact, such schemes are proved non-malleable only in the stand-alone cases. In the multiple-instances setting, i.e., when the scheme is performed concurrently with many instances of itself, such schemes cannot be proved non-malleable. The paper shows an efficient commitment scheme proven to be non-malleable even in the multiple-instances setting, based on the KEA1 and DDH assumptions. Our scheme has a simulator that works in a straight-line manner by using the KEA1-extractor instead of the rewinding strategy.

A communication means is presented for patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in totally locked-in state who are completely unable to move any part of the body and have no usual communication means. The method utilizes changes in cerebral blood volume accompanied with changes in brain activity. When a patient is asked a question and the answer to it is 'yes', the patient makes his or her brain active. The change in blood volume at the frontal lobe is detected with near-infrared light. The instantaneous amplitude and phase of the change are calculated, and the maximum amplitude and phase change are obtained. The answer 'yes' or 'no' of the patient is detected using a discriminant analysis with these two quantities as variables. The rate of correct detection is 80% on average.

To clarify the mechanism of the generation of electromagnetic (EM) noise, current and radiation noise up to the GHz band generated by slowly breaking silver-compound contacts were investigated experimentally. The current and radiation noise at the GHz band were observed. It was demonstrated that the frequency spectrums of the current and radiation noise correspond to the frequency responses of the circuit admittance and radiation efficiency of the experimental setup, respectively. It was revealed that even if current noise at the GHz band is very small, it can cause a large EM radiation noise because of the high radiation efficiency. From the time-frequency domain characteristics of current noise, it was clarified that the peaks of current noise at 10 MHz band arise immediately after the initiation of the arc discharge and the transition from metallic phase to gaseous phase. On the other hand, the peak current noise above 100 MHz arises immediately after the initiation of the arc discharge.

A new level shifter is proposed in this paper that mitigates the contention problem between its pull-up and pull-down switches without suffering the delay penalty. Comparing this new one with two conventional shifters (CLS-1 and CLS-2) indicates that CLS-1 and CLS-2 have the delay times which are 308% and 26% slower than the proposed shifter when VDDL/VDDH=0.3 and the fan-out=2, respectively. In addition, the comparison of power-delay products shows CLS-2 consumes 28.5% more energy than the proposed shifter. For the layout area, the proposed shifter needs only 15% more than CLS-2. By comparing the propagation delay times, the power-delay products, and the area overhead, the proposed shifter is considered very suitable to future Very Deep Sub-Micron (VDSM) technologies with low-voltage applications.

We propose a new genetic fuzzy discretization method with feature selection for the pattern classification problems. Traditional discretization methods categorize a continuous attribute into a number of bins. Because they are made on crisp discretization, there exists considerable information loss. Fuzzy discretization allows overlapping intervals and reflects linguistic classification. However, the number of intervals, the boundaries of intervals, and the degrees of overlapping are intractable to get optimized and a discretization process increases the total amount of data being transformed. We use a genetic algorithm with feature selection not only to optimize these parameters but also to reduce the amount of transformed data by filtering the unconcerned attributes. Experimental results showed considerable improvement on the classification accuracy over a crisp discretization and a typical fuzzy discretization with feature selection.

Grey world algorithm is a well-known color constancy algorithm. It is based on the Grey-World assumption i.e., the average reflectance of surfaces in the world is achromatic. This algorithm is simple and has low computational costs. However, for the images with several colors, the light source color could not be estimated correctly using the Grey World algorithm. In this paper, we propose a Multi-scale Adaptive Grey World algorithm (MAGW). First, multi-scale images are obtained based on wavelet transformation and the illumination color is estimated from different scales images. Then according to the estimated illumination color, the original image is mapped into the image under a canonical illumination with supervision of an adaptive reliability function, which is based on the image entropy. The experimental results show that our algorithm is effective and also has low computational costs.

While efficient use of network resources is an important control objective of call admission control (CAC), the issue of fairness among services should also be taken into account. Game theory provides a suitable framework for formulating such fair and efficient CAC problem. Thus, in this paper, a game theoretic framework for selecting fair-efficient threshold parameters of CAC for the asymmetrical traffic case in CDMA mobile multimedia systems is proposed. For the cooperative game, the arbitration schemes for the interpersonal comparisons of utility and the bargaining problem, including the Nash, Raiffa, and modified Thomson solutions, are investigated. Furthermore, since CAC should be simple and flexible to provide a fast response to diverse QoS call requests during a connection setup, this paper also applies the concept of load factor to the previous Jeon and Jeong's CAC scheme and proposes an approximation approach to reduce the computational complexity (proposed throughput-based CAC scheme). From the numerical results, the proposed throughput-based CAC scheme shows a comparable performance to the previous Jeon and Jeong's CAC scheme while achieving lower computational complexity. All the solutions attain the fairness by satisfying their different fairness senses and efficiency by the Pareto optimality.

Internet access traffic follows hourly patterns that depend on various factors, such as the periods users stay on-line at the access point (e.g. at home or in the office) or their preferences for applications. The clustering of Internet users may provide important information for traffic engineering and billing. For example, it can be used to set up service differentiation according to hourly behavior, resource optimization based on multi-hour routing and definition of tariffs that promote Internet access in low busy hours. In this work, we propose a methodology for clustering Internet users with similar patterns of Internet utilization, according to their hourly traffic utilization. The methodology resorts to three statistical multivariate analysis techniques: cluster analysis, principal component analysis and discriminant analysis. The methodology is illustrated through measured data from two distinct ISPs, one using a CATV access network and the other an ADSL one, offering distinct traffic contracts. Principal component analysis is used as an exploratory tool. Cluster analysis is used to identify the relevant Internet usage profiles, with the partitioning around medoids and Ward's method being the preferred clustering methods. For the two data sets, these methods lead to the choice of 3 clusters with different hourly traffic utilization profiles. The cluster structure is validated through discriminant analysis. It is also evaluated in terms of several characteristics of the user traffic not used in the cluster analysis, such as the type of applications, the amount of downloaded traffic, the activity duration and the transfer rate, resulting in coherent outcomes.

In this paper, we present a novel method to incorporate metadata into data mining. The method has many advantages. It can be completed automatically and is independent of a specific database. Firstly, we convert metadata into ontology. Then input a rule set to a reasoner, which supports rule-based inference over the ontology model. The outputs of the reasoner describe the prior knowledge in metadata. Finally, incorporate the prior knowledge into data mining.

Power supply noise waveforms are acquired in a voltage domain by an on-chip monitor at resolutions of 0.3 ns/1.2 mV, in a digital test circuit consisting of 0.18-µm CMOS standard logic cells. Concurrently, magnetic field variation on a printed circuit board (PCB) due to power supply current of the test circuit is measured by an off-chip magnetic probing technique. An equivalent circuit model that unifies on- and off-chip impedance network of the entire test setup for EMI analysis is used for calculating the on-chip voltage-mode power supply noise from the off-chip magnetic field measurements. We have confirmed excellent consistency in frequency components of power supply noises up to 300 MHz among those derived by the on-chip direct sensing and the off-chip magnetic probing techniques. These results not only validate the state-of-the art EMI analysis methodology but also promise its connectivity with on-chip power supply integrity analysis at the integrated circuit level, for the first time in both technical fields.

An age-group classification method based on a fusion of different classifiers with different two-dimensional feature extraction algorithms is proposed. Theoretically, an integration of multiple classifiers can provide better performance compared to a single classifier. In this paper, we extract effective features from one sample image using different dimensional reduction methods, construct multiple classifiers in each subspace, and combine them to reduce age-group classification errors. As for the dimensional reduction methods, two-dimensional PCA (2DPCA) and two-dimensional LDA (2DLDA) are used. These algorithms are antisymmetric in the treatment of the rows and the columns of the images. We prepared the row-based and column-based algorithms to make two different classifiers with different error tendencies. By combining these classifiers with different errors, the performance can be improved. Experimental results show that our fusion-based age-group classification method achieves better performance than existing two-dimensional algorithms alone.

This paper proposes a suboptimal algorithm for the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. The proposed algorithm regards transmitted signals as continuous variables in the same way as a common method for the discrete optimization problem, and then searches for candidates of the transmitted signals in the direction of a modified gradient vector of the metric. The vector is almost proportional to the direction of the noise enhancement, from which zero-forcing (ZF) or minimum mean square error (MMSE) algorithms suffer. This method sets the initial guess to the solution by ZF or MMSE algorithms, which can be recursively calculated. Also, the proposed algorithm has the same complexity order as that of conventional suboptimal algorithms. Computer simulations demonstrate that it is much superior in BER performance to the conventional ones.

The paper describes a low complexity tree-structure based user scheduling algorithm in an up-link transmission of MLD-based multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems. An M-branch selection algorithm, which selects M most-possible best branches at each step, is proposed to maximize the whole system sum-rate capacity. To achieve the maximum capacity in multi-user MIMO systems, antennas configuration and user selection are preformed simultaneously. Then according to the selected number of antennas for each user, different transmission schemes are also adopted. Both the theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithms obtain near optimal performance with far low complexity than the full search procedure.

Recently low-voltage and low-noise analog circuits with sub 100-nm CMOS devices are strongly demanded for implementing mobile digital multimedia and wireless systems. Reduction of supply voltage makes it difficult to attain a signal voltage swing, and device deviation causes large DC offset voltage and 1/f noise. This paper describes noise reduction technique for CMOS analog and RF circuits operated at a low supply voltage below 1 V. First, autozeroing and chopper stabilization techniques without floating analog switches are introduced. The amplifier test chip with a 0.18-µm CMOS was measured at a 0.6-V supply, and achieved 89-nV/ input referred noise (at 100 Hz). Secondly, in RF frequency range, to improve a phase noise of voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), two 1/f-noise reduction techniques are described. The ring VCO test chip achieves 1-GHz oscillation, -68 dBc/Hz at 100-kHz offset, 710-µW power dissipation at 1-V power supply.

We propose a simple and scalable scheduler called Elapsing Time-based Priority (ETP) scheduler for the optical burst switch (OBS) control channel; it eliminates the requirements of global synchronization and core-state information. This scheduler reduces edge-to-edge delays of burst control packets and total latencies of data bursts.

In order to improve the antenna gain, a composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave (LW) antenna composed of symmetrical unit cells with short stubs terminated by vertical vias is designed. The use of symmetrical unit cells suppresses the cross-polarization of radiation to less than 23 dB. By comparing the measured radiation characteristics to that of a conventional CRLH LW antenna without short stub in the X-band, it is shown that the presented CRLH LW antenna with 51 unit cells offers a narrower beam and the antenna gain improves 4.1, 2.2 and 3.1 dB in the backward, broadside and forward directions of radiation, respectively.

The extened Kalman filter (EKF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF) have been successively applied in particle filter framework to generate proposal distributions, and shown significantly improving performance of the generic particle filter that uses transition prior, i.e., the system state transition prior distribution, as the proposal distribution. In this paper we propose to use the Gauss-Newton EKF/UKF to replace EKF/UKF for generating proposal distribution in a particle filter. The Gauss-Newton EKF/UKF that uses iterated measurement update can approximate the optimal proposal distribution more closer than EKF/UKF, especially in the case of significant nonlinearity in the measurement function. As a result, the Gauss-Newton EKF/UKF is able to generate and propagate the proposal distribution for each particle much better than EKF/UKF, thus further improving the performance of state estimation. Simulation results for a nonlinear/non-Gaussian time-series demonstrate the superior estimation accuracy of our method compared with state-of-the-art filters.