This paper compares by computer simulation the achievable throughput performance employing fast packet scheduling algorithms focusing on the throughput of each user in High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). Three packet scheduling algorithms are employed: the Maximum carrier-to-interference power ratio (CIR), Proportional Fairness (PF), and Round Robin (RR) methods. The simulation results elucidate that although the Maximum CIR method achieves an aggregated user throughput within a cell higher than that using the PF and RR methods, the PF method is advantageous because it enhances the user throughput for a large number of users with a lower received signal-to-interference power ratio (SIR), who are located outside the normalized distance of 0.6-0.7 from a cell site (this corresponds to the area probability of 50-60% within the cell) compared to the Maximum CIR method. It is also shown that when the PF method is employed, the probability of user throughput of greater than 2 Mbps in the vicinity of the cell site becomes approximately 45% (5%) for L = 1-path (2-path) fading channel, while it is almost 80% (50%) when using the Maximum CIR method. Finally, we show that the average user throughput in a 2-path Rayleigh fading channel is reduced by approximately 30% compared to that in a 1-path channel due to severe multipath interference (MPI) and that the average user throughput is strongly affected by the total traffic produced within a cell, which is directly dependent on the number of users within a cell and the data size per packet call.

This paper presents an effective approach for estimating of the load matching conditions for dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) load. By the simulation method proposed here, optimal working frequency and optimal applied voltage for driving of DBD load can be calculated. Estimation results for the DBD ultraviolet generation lamp as a load of series resonant inverter are presented here, together with their evaluations.

This paper presents a fuzzy control-based intelligent medium access controller (FiMAC), which optimizes random access control between heterogeneous traffic aiming at more efficient voice/data integrated services in dynamic reservation TDMA-based broadband radio access networks. In order to achieve the design objective, viz. a differentiated quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee for individual service plus maximal system resource utilization, the FiMAC intelligently and independently controls the random access parameters such as the lengths of random access regions dedicated to respective service traffic and the corresponding permission probabilities, frame-by-frame basis. In addition, we have adopted a mobile-assisted random access mechanism where the voice terminal readjusts a global permission probability from the FiMAC, to handle the 'fair access' issue resulting from distributed queueing problems inherent in the access network. Our extensive simulation results indicate that the FiMAC is well coordinated with a mobile-assisted mechanism such that significant improvements are achieved in terms of voice capacity, delay, and fairness over most of the existing MAC schemes for the integrated services.

A receiver structure, which has linear computational complexity with the number of users, is proposed for decoding multiuser information data in a convolutionally coded asynchronous DS-CDMA system in multipath fading channels. The proposed receiver architecture consists of a multiuser likelihood calculator followed by a bank of soft-input soft-output (SISO) channel decoders. Information is fed back from SISO channel decoders to multiuser likelihood calculator, and the processing proceeds in an iterative fashion analogous to the decoding of turbo codes. A simplification to the above receiver structure is given too. Simulation results demonstrate that for both receiver structures at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) both multiple-access interference (MAI) and inter-symbol interference (ISI) are efficiently suppressed, and single-user performance is approached. Furthermore, the proposed iterative receiver is near-far resistant.

Higher-order harmonics and distortions generated by nonlinearity of capacitance-voltage characteristic of a single varactor and an anti-series-connected varactor pair are analyzed and compared. The effect of linear and parabolic terms of nonlinearity to harmonics outputs and distortions is discussed. It is shown that an anti-series-connected varactor pair has a completely suppressed linear term and reduced parabolic term. The advantage of an anti-series-connected varactor pair is theoretically explained.

In this paper, we propose an efficient quality-providing scheme to satisfy delay bound and loss ratio requirements for real-time video applications. To utilize network resources more efficiently while meeting service requirements, the network resources are dynamically allocated to each video connection based on the predicted traffic and currently provided quality of service degree. With the proposed bandwidth allocation method, a fair quality of service support in terms of packet loss ratio and maximum packet transfer delay to each video source can be achieved. To avoid possible quality violation by incoming new video connections, we present a connection admission control based on the provided QoS for existing connections and the measured traffic statistics. Simulation results show that our proposed dynamic method is able to provide accurate quality control.

This paper describes an automatic interface insertion scheme for in-system verification of algorithm models. To insert the interface, an algorithm model described in C is translated into another source code that includes the communication with hardware components in the target system to be validated with the algorithm model. The communication between the algorithm model and hardware components is achieved using transactors that perform transformation between access operations and bus cycle transactions. I/O terminal is introduced as an interface model to relate the transactions to access operations during the execution of the algorithm model, i.e., accesses to I/O terminals invoke bus cycle transactions in hardware and vice versa. An automatic interface insertion tool is developed using the source-to-source translation to identify the I/O terminals and insert interface function calls in the source code. The proposed automatic interface insertion scheme is validated by emulating several multimedia algorithms written in C on real target systems.

In this paper, we propose a floorplanning method for VLSI building block layout. The proposed method produces a floorplan under the timing constraint for a given netlist. To evaluate the wiring delay, the proposed method estimates the global routing cost for each net with buffer insertion and wire sizing. The slicing structure is adopted to represent a floorplan, and the Elmore delay model is used to estimate the wiring delay. The proposed method is based on simulated annealing. To shorten the computation time, a table look-up method is adopted to calculate the wiring delay. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs well for producing satisfactory floorplans for industrial data.

The purpose of a testability analysis program is to estimate the difficulty of testing a fault. A good measurement can give an early warning about the testing problem so as to provide guidance in improving the testability of a circuit. There have been researches attempting to efficiently compute the testability analysis. Among those, the Controllability and Observability Procedure COP can calculate the testability value of a stuck-at fault efficiently in a tree-structured circuit but may be very inaccurate for a general circuit. The inaccuracy in COP is due to the ignorance of signal correlations. Recently, the algorithm of TAIR in [5] proposes a testability analysis algorithm, which starts from the result of COP and then gradually improves the result by applying a set of rules. The set of rules in TAIR can capture some signal correlations and therefore the results of TAIR are more accurate than COP. In this paper, we first prove that the rules in TAIR can be replaced by a closed-form formulation. Then, based on the closed-form formulation, we proposed two novel techniques to further improve the testability analysis results. Our experimental results have shown improvement over the results of TAIR.

This letter presents a new approximation algorithm suitable for Taylor series expansion. The algorithm can effectively reduce the approximation error by using only a small number of terms in series expansion. The proposed algorithm can be more easily implemented and has better performance than the conventional Euler approximation algorithm. Also, the approximation performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with direct approaches, such as least-squares and Chebyshev approximation algorithm to show the relative advantages of the proposed algorithm. This letter also presents an application example of the proposed approximation algorithm in carrier recovery of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modem.

A virtual city, a virtual reality system to display an urban scene, is one of the most promising tools for ITS applications, including car navigation aids, shopping guides, and city planning, to name a few. This paper overviews our effort to create virtual cities through a sequence of images obtained with vision/range sensors. Our virtual city consists not of only stationary buildings but also of running and parked vehicles, which reflect the current activities in the real city. The first part of this paper describes how to construct still building images from a sequence of images. Here, we focus on methods employing an omni image camera that acquires images containing rays of 360 degrees viewing directions. The second part describes a system to display vehicle movement in the virtual city based on the image sequence given with a monitoring TV camera at an intersection. It also describes a preliminary step toward displaying illegal parked vehicles from information collected by a probe car.

In this paper, we propose a new job scheduling method for distributed parallel systems that can simultaneously achieve two main goals of the job scheduling in those systems: to minimize the execution time of a parallel job without disturbing the execution of the other jobs. We try to achieve those goals by introducing a new scheduler, called active scheduler, that dynamically controls the priority of parallel programs and balances the workload of host computers depending on the status of the underlying runtime environment. We implemented a prototype system of the scheduler to evaluate its effectiveness. The result of experiments implies that the overhead of introducing the active scheduler is at most 15% of the original execution time, and it is in fact effective to adjust the execution of parallel programs to an actual distributed environment in which many users execute their jobs simultaneously.

The locally optimum rank detector achieves a simpler detector structure when reference observations, in addition to regular observations, are available. Without reference observations, we have to use the sign statistics of regular observations, and using the sign statistics results in a complex detector structure. Instead, more computations are necessary to deal with additional reference observations.

In this paper, we consider a flexible method for designing n-entities communication protocols and services. The proposed technique considers alternative and parallel composition of n service specifications and n protocol specifications, where n 2. The specifications are specified in Basic LOTOS which is a Formal Description Technique (FDT). We use the weak bisimulation equivalence () to represent the correctness properties between the service specification and the protocol specification.

In this paper, we propose a new channel allocation scheme, which is designed to efficiently carry out handoffs in wireless networks. Our scheme is based on conventional handoff methods, which include the channel reservation, carrying and sub-rating methods to assign channels for handoffs. First, we reserve a number of channels only for handoffs. Second, if there is no available channel in the next cell during handoff, the mobile station is allowed to carry a movable channel into the next cell. Finally, in order to avoid co-channel interference due to channel mobility, we adopt the sub-rating method for its carried channel. We evaluated our scheme using both Markov analysis and computer simulation. The analytical and simulation results indicate that our scheme may offer better performance than conventional handoff schemes in terms of handoff blocking probability and channel utilization.

We have successfully produced laterally-grown grains on large (300 350 mm) glass substrates by means of a newly developed excimer laser crystallization system that features a high-precision mask stage and an auto-focusing system. The original grains were produced with a steep beam edge and their lateral growth was extended by repeated irradiation and translation. TFTs fabricated with these extended grains were found to have mobilities that remained almost constant at 270 cm2/Vs (n-ch. TFTs) and 230 cm2/Vs (p-ch. TFTs) over a wide range of laser fluence (400-600 mJ/cm2).

In this paper, three algorithms are proposed for rate maximization (RM) of transmitted data in multichannel (MC) communications, subject to joint constraints on available energy budget and tolerable degradation of service (DOS). Altogether referred to as the RM algorithms, they consist of the EADRM, the DADRM, and the fDADRM algorithms. Based on the rate-distortion optimization theory, closed-form expressions for optimally distributing the energy (for EADRM) or DOS (for DADRM and fDADRM ) among the subchannels (SC's) are derived, when the bit allocation is pre-specified. The specification of bit allocations is achieved by the use of the so-called eligible bit allocation matrix (EBAM), which is a function of the total data rate and the number of SC's. A greedy approach is adopted, where the total data rate is kept on raising until the relevant constraints can no longer be satisfied. While all three RM algorithms essentially generate identical maximum data rates, the fDADRM algorithm is much faster than the other two in computation. As compared to the result achievable by a single-channel communication scheme, the RM algorithms produce a much higher data rate for spectrally shaped channels.

A practical EB-testing-pad method, that enables higher observability of multilevel wiring LSIs without any increase of chip size, has been evaluated by using actual 0.25-µm SIMOX/CMOS devices. First, an 80k-gate logic LSI with testing pads was developed, and it was proved that observability improves from 17% to 87%. Next, two kinds of gate-chain TEGs (test element groups), with and without testing pads was developed to investigate the influence of testing pads on gate delay. It was found that the circuit delay increase due to the pads is very small, less than 2.7%. It was also found that capacitances from neighboring wires will increase only by at most 3% due to the testing pads. Thus, the testing pad method has been proved to be extremely effective in improving observability without any overhead in design.

Unlike in existing mobile networks, a variety of services having different quality requirements will be provided in future mobile networks, where any single group of service users can not characterize the whole traffic distribution in the system. Beginning at the mobile network design, the population of service subscribers is estimated and then base stations are located. As the service market evolves, the volume of users might grow or the population of users distributed between the multiple services as well as the located cells might change. In this case, two questions are of interest: how much growth in user population and what change in user distribution can be accommodated in the current cell configuration. If such shifts could not be admitted, current frequency and base station allocations should be expanded or reallocated. In this paper, we provide a framework that can decide whether the present network configuration is able to admit the changes of interest. Admissibility decision rules are addressed with proofs.

In this paper, we propose a new neural filter to which the features related to a given task are input, called a neural filter with features (NFF), to improve further the performance of the conventional neural filter. In order to handle the issue concerning the optimal selection of input features, we propose a framework composed of 1) manual selection of candidates for input features related to a given task and 2) training with automatically selection of the optimal input features required for achieving the given task. Experiments on the proposed framework with an application to improving the image quality of medical X-ray image sequences were performed. The experimental results demonstrated that the performance on edge-preserving smoothing of the NFF, obtained by the proposed framework, is superior to that of the conventional neural and dynamic filters.