This paper proposes an efficient multiuser relay scheme in OFDMA systems. In the proposed scheme, multiple terminals transmit their data packets simultaneously in the same subband and multiple relay stations retransmit their received signals in different subbands after subband conversion. A base station (BS) extracts individual packets from received signals in the different subbands. In advance of data transmission, the BS selects appropriate terminals so that the BS can extract individual data packets successfully. Numerical results show that the proposed relay scheme achieves higher system throughput than the conventional relay scheme when scheduling is applied to a larger number of terminals than the number of relay stations.

In this paper, we propose a novel Web service composition framework which dynamically accommodates various failure recovery requirements. In the proposed framework called Adaptive Failure-handling Framework (AdaFF), failure-handling submodules are prepared during the design of a composite service, and some of them are systematically selected and automatically combined with the composite Web service at service instantiation in accordance with the requirement of individual users. In contrast, existing frameworks cannot adapt the failure-handling behaviors to user's requirements. AdaFF rapidly delivers a composite service supporting the requirement-matched failure handling without manual development, and contributes to a flexible composite Web service design in that service architects never care about failure handling or variable requirements of users. For proof of concept, we implement a prototype system of the AdaFF, which automatically generates a composite service instance with Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) according to the users' requirement specified in XML format and executes the generated instance on the ActiveBPEL engine.

The effect of wavefront compensation in beam transmission is estimated for ground to satellite laser communications. A numerical analysis is performed using the combination of the isoplanatic angle, the atmospheric coherence length and the point-ahead angle to find the aperture size of the beam transmission with which the wavefront compensation effect appears most strongly.

The approximation expression about error accumulation of a long-term prediction is derived. By analyzing this formula, we find that the factors that can affect the long-term predictability include the model parameters, prediction errors and the derivates of the used basis functions. To enlarge the maximum attempting time, we present that more suitable basis functions should be those with smaller derivative functions and a fast attenuation where out of the time series range. We compare the long-term predictability of a non-polynomial based algorithm and a polynomial one to prove the success of our method.

This paper presents an agent-based system for building and operating context-aware services in public spaces, including museums. The system provides users with agents and detects the locations of users and deploys location-aware user-assistant agents at computers near the their current locations by using active RFID-tags. When a visitor moves between exhibits in a museum, this dynamically deploys his/her agent at the computers close to the exhibits by using mobile agent technology. It annotates the exhibits in his/her personalized form and navigate him/her user to the next exhibits along his/her routes. It also introduces user movement as a natural approach to interacting between users and agents. To demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the system, we constructed location/user-aware visitor-guide services and experimented them for two weeks in a public museum.

This paper presents a framework for formalizing and detecting feature interactions (FIs) in the emerging smart home domain. We first establish a model of home network system (HNS), where every networked appliance (or the HNS environment) is characterized as an object consisting of properties and methods. Then, every HNS service is defined as a sequence of method invocations of the appliances. Within the model, we next formalize two kinds of FIs: (a) appliance interactions and (b) environment interactions. An appliance interaction occurs when two method invocations conflict on the same appliance, whereas an environment interaction arises when two method invocations conflict indirectly via the environment. Finally, we propose offline and online methods that detect FIs before service deployment and during execution, respectively. Through a case study with seven practical services, it is shown that the proposed framework is generic enough to capture feature interactions in HNS integrated services. We also discuss several FI resolution schemes within the proposed framework.

In most cases in wireless networks, a user has a two-way communication that consists of two sessions: uplink and downlink sessions, and its overall satisfaction to the communication depends on the quality of service of both sessions. However, in most previous approaches in wireless resource allocation, the satisfactions of a user for its uplink and downlink sessions are modeled separately and treated independently, which fails to accurately model user's overall satisfaction to its communication. Hence, in this paper we model user's overall satisfaction to its communication considering both its uplink and downlink sessions. To this end, we propose a novel concept for a utility function to model user's overall satisfaction to its communication, which is called a user-level utility function, considering user's satisfaction to uplink and downlink sessions jointly. To show the appropriateness of our approach, we apply our user-level utility functions to scheduling problems in TDMA wireless networks and show the performance improvement of our approach over the traditional approach that does not treat uplink and downlink sessions of a user jointly.

In this letter, we propose a distributed channel assignment where each basestation selects a set of channels shared by multiple users through time domain scheduling for best effort services. The proposed scheme distributedly assigns the channels considering a cochannel interference from neighboring basestations and its own traffic load condition. The computer simulation demonstrates that the proposed scheme appropriately assigns the channels to the basestations taking into account these requirements.

We have been considering the architecture of the future carrier network which will be the successor to Next Generation Network (NGN). Our assessments have clarified the key problems that will arise in the era when NGN has matured. Based on our studies, we define the vision and the architecture that can solve these problems. This paper provides a snapshot of our work in order to contribute to research on the New Generation Network and beyond.

Various observation models have been introduced into the object tracking community, and combining them has become a promising direction. This paper proposes a novel approach for estimating the confidences of different observation models, and then effectively combining them in the particle filter framework. In our approach, spatial Likelihood distribution is represented by three simple but efficient parameters, reflecting the overall similarity, distribution sharpness and degree of multi peak. The balance of these three aspects leads to good estimation of confidences, which helps maintain the advantages of each observation model and further increases robustness to partial occlusion. Experiments on challenging video sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Privacy preserving association rule mining algorithms have been designed for discovering the relations between variables in data while maintaining the data privacy. In this article we revise one of the recently introduced schemes for association rule mining using fake transactions (fs). In particular, our analysis shows that the fs scheme has exhaustive storage and high computation requirements for guaranteeing a reasonable level of privacy. We introduce a realistic definition of privacy that benefits from the average case privacy and motivates the study of a weakness in the structure of fs by fake transactions filtering. In order to overcome this problem, we improve the fs scheme by presenting a hybrid scheme that considers both privacy and resources as two concurrent guidelines. Analytical and empirical results show the efficiency and applicability of our proposed scheme.

Disturbance attenuation for a class of time-delay systems is performed by a combined simple adaptive control (SAC) with a new configuration of disturbance observer (DOB). The nominal system results from the Pade approximation, which is in the form of a non-minimum phase LTI system. For the implementation of SAC and DOB, two parallel feedforward compensators (PFC) are designed with the inverses of PD- and PID-controller, respectively. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller to compensate the disturbance response and uncertain delay time.

Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) systems have attracted much attention as a technology that enhances the total system capacity by generating a virtual MIMO channel between a base station and multiple terminal stations. Extensive evaluations are still needed because there are many more system parameters in MU-MIMO than in single user (SU)-MIMO and the MU-MIMO performance in actual environments is still not well understood. This paper describes the features and effectiveness of a 1616 MU-MIMO testbed in an actual indoor environment. Moreover, we propose a simple adaptive modulation scheme for MU-MIMO-OFDM transmission that employs a bit interleaver in the frequency and space domains. We evaluate the frequency efficiency by obtaining the bit error rate of this testbed in an actual indoor environment. We show that 1644-user MU-MIMO transmission using the proposed modulation scheme achieves the frequency utilization of 870 Mbps and 1 Gbps (respective SNRs: 31 and 36 dB) with a 20-MHz bandwidth.

In this research a new prediction algorithm based on a Fuzzy Mix of Filters (FMF) is developed. The use of a fuzzy mix is a good solution because it makes intuitive the difficult design task of combining several types of filters, so that the outputs of the filters that work closer to their optimal behavior have higher influence in the predicted values. Therefore the FMF adapts, according to the motion of the tracked object or target, the filter weights to reduce the estimation error. The paper develops the theory about the FMF and uses it for applications with hard real-time requirements. The improvement of the proposed FMF is shown in simulation and an implementation on a parallel processor (FPGA) is presented. As a practical application of the FMF, experimental results are provided for a visual servoing task.

A Multi-Property-Preserving (MPP) hash function is a hash function that simultaneously preserves several security properties of the underlying compression function. The Merkle-Damgård with a Permutation (MDP) was shown to preserve unforgeability and pseudorandom oracle property. In this paper, we consider the most basic security properties of hash functions, namely collision resistance, second-preimage resistance, and preimage-resistance. We first show which of these properties are preserved by MDP in the dedicated-key setting. We also identify the properties preserved by four variants of MDP, and five other variants of Merkle-Damgård iterated hash functions. As a result, for the ten hash functions we analyze, we obtain their complete MPP characteristics.

A CMOS current-mode nth-switchable-root circuit composed of a compact logarithm circuit, a divide-by-n circuit, and a compact exponential circuit is proposed. The n can be selected from 5 values by three switches. Simulation results indicate that the compact nth-switchable-root circuit has a wide input-current range for relative errors less than 3%, low power dissipations below 630 µW, and high bandwidth over 330 MHz.

Since scan testing is not based on the function of the circuit, but rather the structure, it is considered to be both a form of over testing and under testing. Moreover, it is important to test VLSIs using the given function. Since the functional specifications are described explicitly in the FSMs, high test quality is expected by performing logical fault testing and timing fault testing. This paper proposes a fault-dependent test generation method to detect specified fault models completely and to increase defect coverage as much as possible under the test length constraint. We present experimental results for MCNC'91 benchmark circuits to evaluate bridging fault coverage, transition fault coverage, and statistical delay quality level and to show the effectiveness of the proposed test generation method compared with a stuck-at fault-dependent test generation method.

The Fourier series expansion method is a useful tool to approach the problems of discontinuities in optical waveguides, and it can apply to analyze the Floquet-modes of photonic crystal waveguides. However, it has known that the Floquet-mode calculation with large truncation order is limited because of the roundoff errors. This paper proposes a novel formulation of the Floquet-modes propagating in two-dimensional photonic crystal waveguides formed by circular cylinders. We introduce a periodic boundary condition as same with the conventional method, and the fields are expressed in the Fourier series expansions. The present formulation also introduces the cylindrical-wave expansions and uses the recursive transition-matrix algorithm, which is used to analyze the scattering from cylinder array. This makes us possible to obtain very high accuracy without the use of large truncation order for Fourier series expansion. The presented formulation is validated by numerical experiments.

A generalized formulation of the instantaneous frequency based on the symmetric higher order differential energy operator is proposed. The motivation for the formulation is that there is some frequency misalignment in time when the ordinary higher order differential energy operator is used for the instantaneous frequency estimator. The special cases of the generalized formulation are also presented. The proposed instantaneous frequency estimators are compared with existing methods in terms of error performance measured in the mean absolute error. In terms of the estimation error performance, the third order instantaneous frequency estimator with the symmetrical structure shows the best result under noise free condition. Under noisy situation, the fourth order instantaneous frequency estimator with the symmetrical structure produces the best results. Application examples are provided to show the usefulness of the estimator.

Ultrasonic imaging is useful in seabed or lakebed observations. We can roughly estimate the sea depth by hearing the echo generated by the boundary of water and rocks or sand. However, the estimation quality is usually not sufficient to draw seabed landscape since the echo signal includes serious distortion caused by autointerference. This paper proposes a novel method to visualize the shape of distant boundaries, such as the seawater-rock/sand boundary, based on the complex-valued Markov random field (CMRF) model. Our method realizes adaptive compensation of distortion without changing the global features in the measurement data, and obtains higher-quality landscape with less computational cost than conventional methods.