The Internet was designed for academic use more than 40 years ago. After having been used commercially, many unpredictable requirements have emerged, including mobility, security and content distribution. In addition, the Internet has become so ossified that fulfilling new requirements is difficult. Instead of developing ad-hoc solutions, re-designing clean-slate Internet architectures has become a key research challenge in networking communities. This survey paper addresses key research issues and then introduces ongoing research projects from Japan, the United States and the European Union.

The noise in digital images acquired by image sensors has complex characteristics due to the variety of noise sources. However, most noise reduction methods assume that an image has additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with a constant standard deviation, and thus such methods are not effective for use with image signal processors (ISPs). To efficiently reduce the noise in an ISP, we estimate a unified noise model for an image sensor that can handle shot noise, dark-current noise, and fixed-pattern noise (FPN) together, and then we adaptively reduce the image noise using an adaptive Smallest Univalue Segment Assimilating Nucleus ( SUSAN ) filter based on the unified noise model. Since our noise model is affected only by image sensor gain, the parameters for our noise model do not need to be re-configured depending on the contents of image. Therefore, the proposed noise model is suitable for use in an ISP. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method reduces image sensor noise efficiently.

The trench-gate type high-voltage (HV) MOSFET is one of the variants of HV-MOSFET, typically with its utility segments lying on a larger power consumption domain, compared to planar HV-MOSFETs. In this work, the HiSIM_HV compact model, originally intended for planar LDMOSFETs, was adequately extended to accommodate trench-gate type HV-MOSFETs. The model formulation focuses on a closed-form description of the current path in the highly resistive drift region, specific to the trench-gate HV-MOSFETs. It is verified that the developed compact expression can capture the conductivity in the drift region, which varies with voltage bias and device technology such as trench width. The notable enhancement of current drivability can be accounted for by the electrostatic control exerted by the trench gate within the framework of this model.

We have investigated the impact of O2 annealing after SiOx deposition on the switching behavior to gain a better understanding of the resistance switching mechanism, especially the role of oxygen deficiency in the SiOx network. Although resistive random access memories (ReRAMs) with SiOx after 300 annealing sandwiched with Pt electrodes showed uni-polar type resistance switching characteristics, the switching behaviors were barely detectable for the samples after annealing at temperatures over 500. Taking into account of the average oxygen content in the SiOx films evaluated by XPS measurements, oxygen vacancies in SiOx play an important role in resistance switching. Also, the results of conductive AFM measurements suggest that the formation and disruption of a conducting filament path are mainly responsible for the resistance switching behavior of SiOx.

MIMO two-way multi-hop networks are considered in which the radio resource is fully reused in all multi-hop links to increase spectrum efficiency while the adjacent interference signals are cancelled by MIMO processing. In addition, the nodes in the multi-hop network optimize their transmit powers to mitigate the remaining overreach interference. Our main contribution in this paper is to investigate an efficient relay placement method with power allocation in such networks. We present two formulations, namely QoS-constrained optimization and SINR balancing, and solve them using a sequential geometric programming method. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of convex optimization to find an efficient configuration. Simulation results show that relay placement has an important impact on the effectiveness of power allocation to mitigate the interference. Particularly, we found that an uniform relay location is optimal only in power-limited scenarios. With optimal relay locations, significant end-to-end rate gain and power consumption reduction are achieved by SINR balancing and QoS-constrained optimization, respectively. Furthermore, the optimal number of hops is investigated in power or interference-limited scenarios.

In this paper, we introduce generalized feed-forward shift registers (GF2SR) to apply them to secure and testable scan design. Previously, we introduced SR-equivalents and SR-quasi-equivalents which can be used in secure and testable scan design, and showed that inversion-inserted linear feed-forward shift registers (I2LF2SR) are useful circuits for the secure and testable scan design. GF2SR is an extension of I2LF2SR and the class is much wider than that of I2LF2SR. Since the cardinality of the class of GF2SR is much larger than that of I2LF2SR, the security level of scan design with GF2SR is much higher than that of I2LF2SR. We consider how to control/observe GF2SR to guarantee easy scan-in/out operations, i.e., state-justification and state-identification problems are considered. Both scan-in and scan-out operations can be overlapped in the same way as the conventional scan testing, and hence the test sequence for the proposed scan design is of the same length as the conventional scan design. A program called WAGSR (Web Application for Generalized feed-forward Shift Registers) is presented to solve those problems.

A method of calculating the exact top event probability of a fault tree with dynamic gates and repeated basic events is proposed. The top event probability of such a dynamic fault tree is obtained by converting the tree into an equivalent Markov model. However, the Markov-based method is not realistic for a complex system model because the number of states that should be considered in the Markov analysis increases explosively as the number of basic events in the model increases. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose an alternative method in this paper. It is a hybrid of a Bayesian network (BN) and an algebraic technique. First, modularization is applied to a dynamic fault tree. The detected modules are classified into two types: one satisfies the parental Markov condition and the other does not. The module without the parental Markov condition is replaced with an equivalent single event. The occurrence probability of this event is obtained as the sum of disjoint sequence probabilities. After the contraction of modules without parent Markov condition, the BN algorithm is applied to the dynamic fault tree. The conditional probability tables for dynamic gates are presented. The BN is a standard one and has hierarchical and modular features. Numerical example shows that our method works well for complex systems.

In this paper, negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) reliability of pFETs is analyzed under the post-fabrication SRAM self-improvement scheme that we have developed recently, where cell stability is self-improved by simply applying high stress voltage to supply voltage terminal (VDD) of SRAM cells. It is newly found that there is no significant difference in both threshold voltage and drain current degradation by NBTI stress between fresh PFETs and PFETs after self-improvement scheme application, indicating that the self-improvement scheme has no critical reliability problem.

Temporal Self-Similarity Matrix (SSM) based action recognition is one of the important approaches of single-person oriented action analysis in computer vision. In this study, we propose a new kind of SSM and a fast computation method. The computation method does not require time-consuming pre-processing to find bounding boxes of the human body, instead it processes difference images to obtain action patterns which can be done very quickly. The proposed SSM is experimentally confirmed to have high power/capacity to achieve a better classification performance than four typical kinds of SSMs.

High-resolution time of arrival (TOA) estimation techniques have great promise for the high range resolution required in recently developed radar systems. A widely known super-resolution TOA estimation algorithm for such applications, the multiple-signal classification (MUSIC) in the frequency domain, has been proposed, which exploits an orthogonal relationship between signal and noise eigenvectors obtained by the correlation matrix of the observed transfer function. However, this method suffers severely from a degraded resolution when a number of highly correlated interference signals are mixed in the same range gate. As a solution for this problem, this paper proposes a novel TOA estimation algorithm by introducing a maximum likelihood independent component analysis (MLICA) approach, in which multiple complex sinusoidal signals are efficiently separated by the likelihood criteria determined by the probability density function (PDF) of a complex sinusoid. This MLICA schemes can decompose highly correlated interference signals, and the proposed method then incorporates the MLICA into the MUSIC method, to enhance the range resolution in richly interfered situations. The results from numerical simulations and experimental investigation demonstrate that our proposed pre-processing method can enhance TOA estimation resolution compared with that obtained by the original MUSIC, particularly for lower signal-to-noise ratios.

A gate-all-around tunneling field-effect transistor (GAA TFET) with local high-k gate-dielectric and tunneling-boost n-layer based on silicon is demonstrated by two dimensional (2D) device simulation. Application of local high-k gate-dielectric and n-layer leads to reduce the tunneling barrier width between source and intrinsic channel regions. Thus, it can boost the on-current (Ion) characteristics of TFETs. For optimal design of the proposed device, a tendency of device characteristics has been analyzed in terms of the high-k dielectric length (Lhigh-k) for the fixed n-layer length (Ln-layer). The simulation results have been analyzed in terms of on- and off-current (Ion and Ioff), subthreshold swing (SS), and RF performances.

The wideband noise controlling performance of the delayless subband adaptive filtering technique is affected by the group delay and in-band aliasing distortion of analysis filter banks. A method of recursive second-order cone programming is proposed to design the uniform DFT modulated analysis filter banks, with a small in-band aliasing error and low group delay. Simulation results show that the noise controlling performance is improved with small residual noise power spectra, a high noise attenuation level and fast convergence rate.

This work proposes an exponential computation with low-computational complexity and applies this technique to the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for Gaussian mixture model (GMM). For certain machine-learning techniques, such as the EM algorithm for the GMM, fast and low-cost implementations are preferred over high precision ones. Since the exponential function is frequently used in machine-learning algorithms, this work proposes reducing computational complexity by transforming the function into powers of two and introducing a look-up table. Moreover, to improve efficiency the look-up table is scaled. To verify the validity of the proposed technique, this work obtains simulation results for the EM algorithm used for parameter estimation and evaluates the performances of the results in terms of the mean absolute error and computational time. This work compares our proposed method against the Taylor expansion and the exp( ) function in a standard C library, and shows that the computational time of the EM algorithm is reduced while maintaining comparable precision in the estimation results.

A use of ultra wideband (UWB) technology within spacecrafts has been proposed with a view to partially replacing wired interface buses with wireless connections. Adoption of wireless technologies within the spacecrafts could contribute to reduction in cable weight (and launching cost as a result), reduction in the cost of manufacture, more flexibility in layout of spacecraft subsystems, and reliable connections at rotary, moving, and sliding joints. However, multipath propagation in semi-closed conductive enclosures, such as spacecrafts, restricts the link performance. In this paper, UWB and narrowband propagation were measured in a UWB frequency band (from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, the full-band UWB approved in the United States) within a small spacecrafts and a shield box of the same size. While narrowband propagation resulted in considerable spatial variations in propagation gain due to interferences caused by multipath environments, UWB yielded none. This implies that the UWB systems have an advantage over narrowband from a viewpoint of reducing fading margins. Throughputs exceeding 80 Mb/s were obtained by means of commercially-available UWB devices in the spacecraft. Path gains and throughputs were also measured for various antenna settings and polarizations. Polarization configurations were found to produce almost no effect on average power delay profiles and substantially small effects on the throughputs. Significantly long delay spreads and thus limited link performance are caused by a conductive enclosure (the shield box) without apertures on the surfaces. Even in such an environment, it was found that delay spreads can be suppressed by partially paneling a radio absorber on the inner surfaces. More than 96 Mb/s throughputs were attained when the absorber panel covered typically 4% of the total inner surface area.

With the successful adoption of link analysis techniques such as PageRank and web spam filtering, current web search engines well support “navigational search”. However, due to the use of a simple conjunctive Boolean filter in addition to the inappropriateness of user queries, such an engine does not necessarily well support “informational search”. Informational search would be better handled by a web search engine using an informational retrieval model combined with enhancement techniques such as query expansion and relevance feedback. Moreover, the realization of such an engine requires a method to prosess the model efficiently. In this paper we propose a novel extension of an existing top-k query processing technique to improve search efficiency. We add to it the technique utilizing a simple data structure called a “term-document binary matrix,” resulting in more efficient evaluation of top-k queries even when the queries have been expanded. We show on the basis of experimental evaluation using the TREC GOV2 data set and expanded versions of the evaluation queries attached to this data set that the proposed method can speed up evaluation considerably compared with existing techniques especially when the number of query terms gets larger.

A method for the specification of weighting functions for a spaceborne/airborne interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor for Earth observation and environment monitoring is introduced. This method is based on designing an optimum mismatched filter which minimizes the total power in sidelobes located out of a specified range region around the peak value point of the system point-target response, i.e. impulse response function under the constraint imposed on the peak value. It is shown that this method allows achieving appreciable improvement in accuracy performance without degradation in the range resolution.

This paper presents a method of designing transmission line couplers (TLCs) and a mixer-based receiver for dicode partial response communications. The channel design method results in the optimum TLC design. The receiver with mixers and DC balancing circuits reduces the threshold control circuits and digital circuits to decode dicode partial response signals. Our techniques enable low inter-symbol interference (ISI) dicode partial response communications without three level decision circuits and complex threshold control circuits. The techniques were evaluated in a simulation with an EM solver and a transistor level simulation. The circuit was designed in the 90-nm CMOS process. The simulation results show 12-Gb/s operation and 52mW power consumption at 1.2V.

In this letter, we present a joint blind adaptive scheme to suppress inter-block interference and estimate a carrier frequency offset (CFO) in downlink OFDMA systems. The proposed scheme is a combination of a channel shortening method and a CFO estimator, both based on the carrier nulling criterion. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Turbo equalization is an iterative equalization and decoding technique that can achieve impressive performance gains for communication systems. In this letter, we investigate the turbo equalization method for the decoding of the Davey-MacKay (DM) construction over the IDS-AWGN channels, which indicates a cascaded insertion, deletion, substitution (IDS) channel and an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The inner decoder for the DM construction can be seen as an maximum a-posteriori (MAP) detector. It receives the beliefs generated by the outer LDPC decoder when turbo equalization is used. Two decoding schemes with different kinds of inner decoders, namely hard-input inner decoder and soft-input inner decoder, are investigated. Simulation results show that significant performance gains are obtained for both decoders with respect to the insertion/deletion probability at different SNR values.

The nondeterminism of message-passing communication brings challenges to program debugging, testing and fault-tolerance. This paper proposes a novel deterministic message-passing implementation (DMPI) for parallel programs in the distributed environment. DMPI is compatible with the standard MPI in user interface, and it guarantees the reproducibility of message with high performance. The basic idea of DMPI is to use logical time to solve message races and control asynchronous transmissions, and thus we could eliminate the nondeterministic behaviors of the existing message-passing mechanism. We apply a buffering strategy to alleviate the performance slowdown caused by mismatch of logical time and physical time. To avoid deadlocks introduced by deterministic mechanisms, we also integrate DMPI with a lightweight deadlock checker to dynamically detect and solve these deadlocks. We have implemented DMPI and evaluated it using NPB benchmarks. The results show that DMPI could guarantee determinism with incurring modest runtime overhead (14% on average).