This paper focuses on learning the economic behaviour of the access point (AP) and users in wireless local area networks (WLANs), and using a game theoretic approach to analyze the interactions among them. Recent studies have shown that the AP would adopt a simple, yet optimal, fixed rate pricing strategy when the AP has an unlimited uplink bandwidth to the Internet and the channel capacity of WLAN is unlimited. However, the fixed rate strategy fails to be optimal if a more realistic model with limited capacity is considered. A substitute pricing scheme for access service provisioning is hence proposed. In particular, the AP first estimates the probable utility degradation of existing users consequent upon the admission of an incoming user. Second, the AP decides: (i) whether the incoming user should be accepted; and (ii) the price to be announced in order to try to maximize the overall revenue. The condition, under which the proposed scheme results in a perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE), is investigated.

It is believed that the wavelength switched optical network (WSON) technology is moving towards being adopted by large-scale networks. Wavelength conversion and signal regeneration through reamplifying, reshaping, and retiming (3R) are beneficial to support the expansion of WSON. In many cases, these two functions can be technically integrated into a single shared physical component, namely the wavelength convertible 3R regenerator (WC3R). However, fully deploying such devices is infeasible due to their excessive cost. Thus, this topic serves as a motivation behind the investigation of the sparse placement issue of WC3Rs presented in this paper. A series of strategies are proposed based on knowledge of the network. Moreover, a novel adaptive routing and joint resource assignment algorithm is presented to provision the lightpaths in WSON with sparsely placed WC3Rs. Extensive simulation trials are conducted under even and uneven distribution of WC3R resource. Each strategic feature is examined for its efficiency in lowering the blocking probability. The results reveal that carefully designed sparse placement of WC3Rs can achieve performance comparable to that of full WC3R placement scenario. Furthermore, the expenditure of WC3R deployment also depends on the type of used WC3Rs characterized by the wavelength convertibility, i.e., fixed WC3R or tunable WC3R. This paper also investigates WSON from the perspective of cost and benefit by employing different types of WC3Rs in order to find the possibility of more efficient WC3R investment.

This letter investigates the outage performance of a joint transmit and receive antenna selection scheme in an amplify-and-forward two-way relaying system with channel estimation error. A closed-form approximate outage probability expression is derived, based on which the asymptotic outage probability expression is derived to get an insight on system's outage performance at high signal-to-noise (SNR) region. Monte Carlo simulation results are presented to verify the analytical results.

Estimating the packet loss ratio of TCP transfers is essential for passively measuring Quality of Service (QoS) on the Internet traffic. However, only a few studies have been conducted on this issue. The Benko-Veres algorithm is one technique for estimating the packet loss ratio of two networks separated by a measurement point. However, this study shows that it leads to an estimation error of a few hundred percent in the particular environment where the packet loss probabilities between the two networks are asymmetrical. We propose a passive method for packet loss estimation that offers improved estimation accuracy by introducing classification conditions for the TCP retransmission timeout. An experiment shows that our proposed algorithm suppressed the maximum estimation error to less than 15%.

This paper proposes a session state migration architecture for flexible server consolidation. One of technical challenges is how to split a session state from a connection and bind the session state to another connection in any servers. A conventional server and client application assumes that a session state is statically bound to a connection once the connection has been established. The proposed architecture reduces the migration latency, compared to an existing study by splitting the session state from the connection. This paper classifies common procedures of session state migration for various services. The session state migration architecture enables service providers to conduct server maintenance at their own convenience, and to conserve energy consumption at servers by consolidating them. A simulation to evaluate server consolidation reveals that the session state migration reduces the number of servers for accommdating users, compared to virtual machine migration. This paper also shows implementation of the session state migration architecture. Experimental results reveal that the impact caused by the proposed architecture on real-time applications is small.

There is a relentless push for cost and size reduction in optical transmitters and receivers for fiber-optic links. Monolithically integrated optical chips in InP and Si may be a way to leap ahead of this trend. We discuss uses of integration technology to accomplish various telecommunications functions.

In Long-Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, heterogeneous networks are important to further improve the system throughput per unit area. In heterogeneous network deployment, low power nodes such as picocells are overlaid onto macrocells. In the downlink, the combined usage of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC), which is a technique that reduces the severe interference from macrocells by reducing the transmission power or stopping the transmission from the macrocells, and cell range expansion (CRE), which is a technique that expands the cell radius of picocells by biasing the received signal power, is very effective in improving the system and cell-edge user throughput. In this paper, we consider two types of ICIC. The first one reduces the transmission power from the macrocells (referred to as reduced power ICIC) and the second one stops the transmission from the macrocells (referred to as zero power ICIC). This paper investigates the impact of the reduction in the transmission power when using reduced power ICIC and the restriction on the modulation scheme caused by the reduction in the transmission power when using reduced power ICIC on the user throughput performance with the CRE offset value as a parameter. In addition, the throughput performance when applying reduced power ICIC is compared to that when applying zero power ICIC. Simulation results show that the user throughput with reduced power ICIC is not sensitive to the protected subframe ratio compared to that with zero power ICIC even if the modulation scheme is restricted to only QPSK in the protected subframes. This indicates that reduced power ICIC is more robust than zero power ICIC for non-optimum protected subframe ratios.

In this paper we propose a method to use features of an individual object to locate and recognize this object concurrently in a static image with Multi-feature fusion based on multiple objects sample library. This method is proposed based on the observation that lots of previous works focuses on category recognition and takes advantage of common characters of special category to detect the existence of it. However, these algorithms cease to be effective if we search existence of individual objects instead of categories in complex background. To solve this problem, we abandon the concept of category and propose an effective way to use directly features of an individual object as clues to detection and recognition. In our system, we import multi-feature fusion method based on colour histogram and prominent SIFT (p-SIFT) feature to improve detection and recognition accuracy rate. p-SIFT feature is an improved SIFT feature acquired by further feature extraction of correlation information based on Feature Matrix aiming at low computation complexity with good matching rate that is proposed by ourselves. In process of detecting object, we abandon conventional methods and instead take full use of multi-feature to start with a simple but effective way-using colour feature to reduce amounts of patches of interest (POI). Our method is evaluated on several publicly available datasets including Pascal VOC 2005 dataset, Objects101 and datasets provided by Achanta et al.

In this article, we propose a method to reduce the impact of primary traffic on spectrum sensing performance. In practice, the sensing performance is degraded by noise-only sample in the spectrum sensing time. Therefore, we employ a time of primary user (PU) signal arrival detector in order to remove the noise-only portion. Then, we employ equal-weight-based energy detection (EWED) to provide the detection decision. The analysis and simulation results show that there exists an optimal early time of arrival (ToA) false alarm which provides better performance compared to the use of a single EWED scheme.

I propose an acoustic model adaptation method using bases constructed through the sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) of acoustic models trained in a clean environment. I perform experiments on adaptation to a new speaker and noise. The SPCA-based method outperforms the PCA-based method in the presence of babble noise.

TransferJetTM is an emerging high-speed close-proximity wireless communication standard, which enables a data transfer up to 522 Mbps within a few centimeters range. We present a fully integrated TransferJet SoC with a 4.48-GHz operating frequency and a 560-MHz signal bandwidth using a 65 nm CMOS technology. Baseband filtering techniques for a transmitter (TX) and a receiver (RX) are proposed in order to handle the ultra-wide bandwidth with low power consumption and small area. A programmable power attenuator (PAT) for precise output power is also proposed in this paper. The SoC achieves energy efficiencies of 0.19 nJ/bit and 0.43 nJ/bit for the TX and the RX, respectively. The RX sensitivity of -70 dBm for 522 Mbps data rate and the TX error vector magnitude (EVM) of -31 dB are achieved.

As the number of cores and the working sets of parallel workloads increase, shared L2 caches exhibit fewer misses than private L2 caches by making a better use of the total available cache capacity, but they induce higher overall L1 miss latencies because of the longer average distance between the requestor and the home node, and the potential congestions at certain nodes. We observed that there is a high probability that the target data of an L1 miss resides in the L1 cache of a neighbor node. In such cases, these long-distance accesses to the home nodes can be potentially avoided. In order to leverage the aforementioned property, we propose Bayesian Theory based Adaptive Proximity Data Accessing (APDA). In our proposal, we organize the multi-core into clusters of 2x2 nodes, and introduce the Proximity Data Prober (PDP) to detect whether an L1 miss can be served by one of the cluster L1 caches. Furthermore, we devise the Bayesian Decision Classifier (BDC) to adaptively select the remote L2 cache or the neighboring L1 node as the server according to the minimum miss cost. We evaluate this approach on a 64-node multi-core using SPLASH-2 and PARSEC benchmarks, and we find that the APDA can reduce the execution time by 20% and reduce the energy by 14% compared to a standard multi-core with a shared L2. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposal outperforms the up-to-date mechanisms, such as ASR, DCC and RNUCA.

Due to the growing popularity of High Dynamic Range (HDR) images and HDR displays, a large amount of existing Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images are required to be converted to HDR format to benefit HDR advantages, which give rise to some LDR to HDR algorithms. Most of these algorithms especially tackle overexposed areas during expanding, which is the potential to make the image quality worse than that before processing and introduces artifacts. To dispel these problems, we present a new LDR to HDR approach, unlike the existing techniques, it focuses on avoiding sophisticated treatment to overexposed areas in dynamic range expansion step. Based on a separating principle, firstly, according to the familiar types of overexposure, the overexposed areas are classified into two categories which are removed and corrected respectively by two kinds of techniques. Secondly, for maintaining color consistency, color recovery is carried out to the preprocessed images. Finally, the LDR image is expanded to HDR. Experiments show that the proposed approach performs well and produced images become more favorable and suitable for applications. The image quality metric also illustrates that we can reveal more details without causing artifacts introduced by other algorithms.

Image processing engine is crucial for generating high quality images in video system. As Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is dedicated for specific standards, Application Specific Instruction-set Processor (ASIP) which provides high flexibility and high performance seems to have more advantages in supporting the nonstandard pre/post image processing in video system. In our previous work, we have designed some ASIPs that can perform several image processing algorithms with a reconfigurable datapath. ASIP is as efficient as DSP, but its area is considerably smaller than DSP. As the resolution of image and the complexity of processing increase, the performance requirement also increases accordingly. In this paper, we presents a novel multi ASIP based image processing unit (IPU) which can provide sufficient performance for the emerging very-high-resolution applications. In order to provide a high performance image processing engine, we propose several new techniques and architecture such as multi block-pipes architecture, pixel direct transmission and boundary pixel write-through. Multi block-pipes architecture has flexible scalability in supporting a various ranges of resolution, which ranges from low resolution to high resolution. The boundary pixel write-through technique provides high efficient parallel processing, and pixel direct transmission technique is implemented in each ASIP to further reduce the data transmission time. Cycle-accurate SystemC simulations are performed, and the experimental results show that the maximum bandwidth of the proposed communication approach can achieve up to 1580 Mbyte/s at 400 MHz. Moreover, communication overhead can be reduced about a maximum of 88% compared to our previous works.

This paper proposes a simple decentralized cell association method for heterogeneous networks, where low transmission-power pico or femto base stations (BSs) overlay onto a high transmission-power macro BS. The focus of this investigation is on the downlink and the purpose of cell association is to achieve better user fairness, in other words, to increase the minimum average user throughput (worst user throughput). In the proposed method, an appropriate cell association for all users within a cell is achieved in an iterative manner based on the feedback information of each individual user assisted by a small amount of broadcast information from the respective BSs. The proposed method does not require cooperation between BSs. Furthermore, the proposed method is applicable to cases of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) between macro and pico/femto BSs through the use of protected radio resources exclusively used by the pico/femto BSs. Based on numerical results, we show that the proposed method adaptively achieves better cell association for all users according to the user location distributions compared to the conventional cell range expansion (CRE) method. The advantage of the proposed method over CRE is further enhanced in an ICIC scenario.

The string analysis is a static analysis of dynamically generated strings in a target program, which is applied to check well-formed string construction in web applications. The string analysis constructs a finite state automaton that approximates a set of possible strings generated for a particular string variable at a program location at runtime. A drawback in the string analysis is imprecision in the analysis result, leading to false positives in the well-formedness checkers. To address the imprecision, this paper proposes an improvement technique of the string analysis to make it perform more precise analysis with respect to input validation in web applications. This paper presents the improvement by annotations representing screening of a set of possible strings, and empirical evaluation with experiments of the improved analyzer on real-world web applications.

This paper analyzes the conventional unequal erasure protection (UXP) scheme for scalable video transmission, and proposes a dynamic hybrid UXP/ARQ transmission framework to improve the performance of the conventional UXP method for bandwidth-constrained scalable video transmission. This framework applies automatic retransmission request (ARQ) to the conventional UXP scheme for scalable video transmission, and dynamically adjusts the transmission time budget of each group of picture (GOP) according to the feedback about the transmission results of the current and previous GOPs from the receiver. Moreover, the parameter of target video quality is introduced and optimized to adapt to the channel condition in pursuit of more efficient dynamic time allocation. In addition, considering the play-out deadline constraint, the time schedule for the proposed scalable video transmission system is presented. Simulation results show that compared with the conventional UXP scheme and its enhanced method, the average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the reconstructed video can be improved significantly over a wide range of packet loss rates. Besides, the visual quality fluctuation among the GOPs can be reduced for the video which has much movement change.

Corpus-based concatenative speech synthesis has been widely investigated and deployed in recent years since it provides a highly natural synthesized speech quality. The amount of computation required in the run time, however, can often be quite large. In this paper, we propose early stopping schemes for Viterbi beam search in the unit selection, with which we can stop early in the local Viterbi minimization for each unit as well as in the exploration of candidate units for a given target. It takes advantage of the fact that the space of the acoustic parameters of the database units is fixed and certain lower bounds of the concatenation costs can be precomputed. The proposed method for early stopping is admissible in that it does not change the result of the Viterbi beam search. Experiments using probability-based concatenation costs as well as distance-based costs show that the proposed methods of admissible stopping effectively reduce the amount of computation required in the Viterbi beam search while keeping its result unchanged. Furthermore, the reduction effect of computation turned out to be much larger if the available lower bound for concatenation costs is tighter.

Dynamic spectrum leasing (DSL) is regarded as a promising dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) scheme both to improve the spectrum revenue of primary users (PUs) and to guarantee the QoS of secondary users (SUs). A pricing-based DSL termed PBDSL is formulated as a Stackelberg DSL game model, where PUs as players entering the interacting game with multiple SUs. The strategic design contains both optimal spectrum pricing schemes (including unit spectrum/interference price and interference sensitivity distributed adjustments) of PUs for the specific shared/leased spectrum and optimal transmission strategies (e.g., transmit power and bandwidth) of SUs. To capture two types of competition relationships among multiple SUs and between SUs and PUs, we investigate two intra-game models of multiple PUs and SUs, respectively, which interact with each other to constitute the final Stackelberg DSL game. The existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium solution (SES) are analyzed and proved for presented games, based on which a joint multi-stage PBDSL algorithm is presented to approximate the optimal equilibrium strategies. Numerical results demonstrate the convergence property of the interactive decision-making process, and verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, in a comparison with the Nash equilibrium solution (NES)-based approach.

This paper deals with delay faults on clock lines assuming the launch-on-capture test. In this realistic fault model, the amount of delay at the FF driven by the faulty clock line is such that the scan shift operation can perform correctly even in the presence of a fault, but during the system clock operation, capturing functional value(s) at faulty FF(s), i.e. FF(s) driven by the clock with delay, is delayed and correct value(s) may not be captured. We developed a fault simulator that can handle such faults and using this simulator we investigate the relation between the duration of the delay and the difficulty of detecting clock delay faults in the launch-on-capture test. Next, we propose test generation methods for detecting clock delay faults that affect a single or two FFs. Experimental results for benchmark circuits are given in order to establish the effectiveness of the proposed methods.