A matched load for post-wall waveguide (SIW; Substrate Integrated Waveguide) is presented. It consists of an electrically-shorted post-wall waveguide and a rectangular thin-film resistor sheet on the surface of the waveguide, resulting in a quite compact structure without three-dimensional bulky absorber as in conventional waveguide matched loads. A fabricated X-band matched load has achieved less than -20 dB reflection in more than 20% relative bandwidth.

In this paper, we propose a two dimensional (2D) non-separable adaptive directional lifting (ADL) structure for discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and its image coding application. Although a 2D non-separable lifting structure of 9/7 DWT has been proposed by interchanging some lifting, we generalize a polyphase representation of 2D non-separable lifting structure of DWT. Furthermore, by introducing the adaptive directional filteringingto the generalized structure, the 2D non-separable ADL structure is realized and applied into image coding. Our proposed method is simpler than the 1D ADL, and can select the different transforming direction with 1D ADL. Through the simulations, the proposed method is shown to be efficient for the lossy and lossless image coding performance.

This letter presents a new image watermarking scheme using Polar Sine Transform (PST), a new kind of orthogonal moment defined on a circular domain. The PSTs are easy to compute and have no numerical stability problem, thus are more suitable for watermarking. In the proposed method, the PSTs are modified according to the binary watermark bits, producing a compensation image. The watermarked image is obtained by adding the compensation image to the original image directly. Simulation results show the advantages of the proposed scheme in terms of both watermark capacity and watermark robustness.

In this letter, two new network coding (NC) diversity enhancement schemes are introduced for wireless relay systems. Conventional diversity enhancement approaches for relay systems suffer from error propagation at each relay and exhibit second order diversity performance. In the proposed schemes, when a relay experiences a decoding failure, the relay makes a request to have the source transmit the NC frames to the destination in its time slot. Due to this operation, the proposed schemes prevent error propagation and achieve near third order diversity performance. The proposed schemes are compared to conventional schemes based on the derived mathematical error bounds and simulation performance, both of which demonstrate the superiority of the proposed schemes.

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has drawn immediate attention recently since it can opportunistically exploit any spectrum holes and thus improve bandwidth utilization. From the perspective of medium access control (MAC) design, the QoS requirement of SU is one of the design issues in DSA network. In this paper, we propose a new admission control scheme referred to as log-based dynamic spectrum access admission control (DSAC) aiming at (1) protection of the primary users and (2) QoS prioritization for the existing secondary users. The DSAC algorithm protects the PU by limiting SUs' access using PU's arrival log or statistics. Furthermore, the DSAC reserves a channel for previously admitted SU to reduce frequent service disruption of the SU. Reservation of channels is carried out without assuming any specific arrival process, and thus the DSAC would be practical for general user arrival patterns unlike the existing admission control techniques. Performance evaluation has shown that the proposed DSAC outperforms existing admission control schemes with respect to the PU blocking rate, SU communication stability, and SU aggregate throughput by about 13%, 26%, and 20%, respectively.

We consider how to accurately estimate the position of targets that exist in closed areas such as a room. In the past, arranging the sensors in a straight line would trigger large position estimation errors in the same direction of the straight line. However, this arrangement is useful because of easy setting, wirings, and space limitations. In this paper, we show a novel algorithm which can reduce the error using signals from reflection objects such as walls. The algorithm uses ellipse relations among sensors, targets and reflection points. Using ellipse relations, the algorithm estimates the positions of the reflection points which are assumed to be the locations of the virtual sensors. So in spite of the straight sensor arranging, the sensors are virtually distributed such as surrounding the targets. In this paper, we show the algorithm and error reduction performances as determined from computer simulations.

Providing seamless QoS guarantees for multimedia services is one of the most critical requirements in the mobile Internet. However, the effects of host mobility make it difficult to provide such services. The next steps in signaling (NSIS) was proposed by the IETF as a new signaling protocol, but it fails to address some mobility issues. This paper proposes a new QoS NSIS signaling layer protocol (QoS NSLP) using a cross-layer design that supports mobility. Our approach is based on the advance discovery of a crossover node (CRN) located at the crossing point between a current and a new signaling path. The CRN then proactively reserves network resources along the new path that will be used after handoff. This proactive reservation significantly reduces the session reestablishment delay and resolves the related mobility issues in NSIS. Only a few amendments to the current NSIS protocol are needed to realize our approach. The experimental results and simulation study demonstrate that our approach considerably enhances the current NSIS in terms of QoS performance factors and network resource usage.

We propose a robust and efficient algorithm called ROCKET for clustering large-scale transaction databases. ROCKET is a divisive hierarchical algorithm that makes the most of recent hardware architecture. ROCKET handles the cases with the small and the large number of similar transaction pairs separately and efficiently. Through experiments, we show that ROCKET achieves high-quality clustering with a dramatic performance improvement.

This paper addresses the problem of ordering the color SIFT descriptors in the independent component analysis for image classification. Component ordering is of great importance for image classification, since it is the foundation of feature selection. To select distinctive and compact independent components (IC) of the color SIFT descriptors, we propose two ordering approaches based on local variation, named as the localization-based IC ordering and the sparseness-based IC ordering. We evaluate the performance of proposed methods, the conventional IC selection method (global variation based components selection) and original color SIFT descriptors on object and scene databases, and obtain the following two main results. First, the proposed methods are able to obtain acceptable classification results in comparison with original color SIFT descriptors. Second, the highest classification rate can be obtained by using the global selection method in the scene database, while the local ordering methods give the best performance for the object database.

Distributed systems desire to construct a random overlay graph for robustness, efficient information dissemination and load balancing. A random walk-based overlay construction is a promising alternative to generate an ideal random scale free overlay in distributed systems. However, a simple random walk-based overlay construction can be affected by node churn. Especially, the number of edges increases and the degree distribution is skewed. This inappropriate distortion can be exploited by malicious nodes. In this paper, we propose a modified random walk-based overlay construction supported by a logistic/trial based decision function to compensate the impact of node churn. Through event-driven simulations, we show that the decision function helps an overlay maintain the proper degree distribution, low diameter and low clustering coefficient with shorter random walks.

Context awareness is viewed as one of the most important goals in the pervasive computing paradigm. As one kind of context awareness, danger awareness describes and detects dangerous situations around a user, and provides services such as warning to protect the user from dangers. One important problem arising in danger-aware systems is that the description/definition of dangerous situations becomes more and more complex, since many factors have to be considered in such description, which brings a big burden to the developers/users and thereby reduces the reliability of the system. It is necessary to develop a flexible reasoning method, which can ease the description/definition of dangerous situations by reasoning dangers using limited specified/predefined contexts/rules, and increase system reliability by detecting unspecified dangerous situations. Some reasoning mechanisms based on context similarity were proposed to address the above problems. However, the current mechanisms are not so accurate in some cases, since the similarity is computed from only basic knowledge, e.g. nature property, such as material, size etc, and category information, i.e. they may cause false positive and false negative problems. To solve the above problems, in this paper we propose a new flexible and accurate method from feature point of view. Firstly, a new ontology explicitly integrating basic knowledge and danger feature is designed for computing similarity in danger-aware systems. Then a new method is proposed to compute object similarity from both basic knowledge and danger feature point of views when calculating context similarity. The method is implemented in an indoor ubiquitous test bed and evaluated through experiments. The experiment result shows that the accuracy of system can be effectively increased based on the comparison between system decision and estimation of human observers, comparing with the existing methods. And the burden of defining dangerous situations can be decreased by evaluating trade-off between the system's accuracy and burden of defining dangerous situations.

With measuring the arc current, arc voltage and arc images, the high-current air arc commutation process across the separated electrodes was investigated. It shows that the existence of a short stable arc in the gap may increase the current commutation time. According to the energy balance of the arc column, the conditions to maintain the short stable arc were introduced and the effects of the current limiting resistance on the current commutation process were discussed.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a supply and process-insensitive 12-bit Digital Pulse Width Modulator (DPWM) for digital DC-DC converters. The DPWM is realized by a ring oscillator-based segmented tapped delay line and a counter-comparator. The number of delay cells required is reduced by employing a proposed delay cell reuse technique. The ring oscillator of the tapped delay line is made insensitive to supply and process variation by biasing the differential delay cells with a supply-insensitive replica bias circuit. Simulation results show that the variation of the switching frequency of the DPWM at 1.02 MHz is 0.4% for supply voltage variation between 1.5 V and 2.5 V and 0.95% over the temperature range from -40 to 90. Monte-Carlo simulation was also performed to account for the effect of mismatch between the transistors of the ring oscillator. The worst case delay of the delay cells is 0.87% for 5% (3-σ) mismatch. The design was fabricated in CMOS 0.18 µm process and the fabricated DPWM achieved a supply sensitivity of 0.82% and a current consumption of 14 µA.

In this paper, the joint optimization issue of the cooperative precoder design is investigated for the transmission from the cooperative multi-point system to one mobile terminal. Based on the mean squared error minimization criterion, the problem is established for the cooperative precoder design. Unfortunately, this problem cannot be solved due to the block diagonal structure of the whole precoding matrix resulting from the fact that there is no data exchange among multiple base stations. In order to tackle this difficulty, the original problem is converted into an equivalent problem by stacking all of the nonzero entries in the block diagonal matrix into a long column vector. With the equivalent problem, the optimum solution is obtained in a closed-form expression by using the Lagrangian multiplier method. Numerical simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of bit error rate and spectral efficiency.

The advantages of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are high spectral efficiency, resiliency to RF interference, lower multi-path distortion and others. To further utilize the vast channel capacity of the multiuser OFDM, one has to find the efficient adaptive subcarrier and bit allocation among users. In this paper, we propose a 0-1 integer programming model formulating the optimal subcarrier and bit allocation problem of the multiuser OFDM. We proved that the continuous relaxation of our formulation is tighter than the previous convex optimization formulation based on perspective function and the Lagrangian dual bound of our formulation is equivalent to the linear programming relaxation bound. The proposed Lagrangian dual is seperable with respect to subcarriers and allows an efficient dual maximization algorithm. We compared the performance of the integer programming formulation and the Lagrangian dual of our formulation and the continuous relaxation and the primal heuristic proposed in [3]. Computer simulation on a system employing M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) assuming a frequency-selective channel consisting of three independent Rayleigh multipaths is carried out with the optimal subcarrier and bit allocation solution generated by the 0-1 integer programming model.

This paper focuses on the research of a new high-speed DC switch repulsion mechanism with experimental and simulation methods. Multi-physical equations reflecting the transient electromagnetic field, electric circuit, mechanical motion and material deformation are coupled in the calculation. For the reason of accuracy, skin effect and the proximity effect caused by the current in the coil are also taken into account. According to the simulation results, which indicate several key parameters severely affecting the mechanism speed, a high-speed DC switch repulsion mechanism is developed. By the test of mechanism motion, its average speed can be up to 8.4 m/s and its mechanism response time is 250 µs, which verifies the simulation results. Furthermore, during high speed motion the stress on the metal plate and moving contact is also discussed. It is noticed that the influence of the material deformation on the mechanical motion is very important.

This paper presents a new unequal error protection (UEP) image transmission system that incorporates a Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT) and Reed Solomon (RS) coded cooperation scheme to increase image transmission diversity, as well as save transmission bandwidth. Having a partner to assist direct communication increases the resilience of low frequency subband data against an error-prone fading channel. Low frequency subbands are partitioned into two sets of data and transmitted using the RS coded cooperation scheme. High frequency subbands data are transmitted directly to a base station. Results show that the new UEP image transmission system using LWT based RS coded cooperation scheme achieves diversity gains of around 10 dB, with channel SNR from 10 to 20 dB, compared with the image transmission system with non-cooperative system under slow Rayleigh fading channel for all levels of LWT decomposition. In addition, the new UEP image transmission system using LWT based RS coded cooperation scheme with one level of wavelet decomposition offers around 37.5% bandwidth gain (β), compared with the system without LWT, which incurs a reduction of 3 dB in reconstructed image quality.

In this paper, we present a sequentially rotated array antenna with a rectangular patch MSA fed by an L-probe. Since it's important to decrease couplings between patch elements in order to suppress the cross-polarization level, rectangular patches with aspect ratio of k are adopted. We investigate the cross-polarization level of the sequential array and discuss the relationship between the cross-polarization level and the mutual coupling. As a result, the bandwdith of the antenna element is obtained 14.6% when its VSWR is less than 1.5, and the directivity and cross-polarization level of a 4-patch sequential array are 10.8 dBic and 1.7 dBic, respectively, where k=0.6 and the patch spacing of d=0.5 wave length. These characteristics are 5.6 dB and 5.8 dB better than the corresponding values of a square patch sequential array antenna.

A novel algorithm is presented for near-field source localization with a symmetric uniform linear array (ULA) consisting of an even number of sensors. Based on element reordering of a symmetric ULA, the steering vector is factorised with respect to the range-independent bearing parameters and range-relevant 2-D location parameters, which allows the range-independent bearing estimation with rank-reduction idea. With the estimated bearing, the range estimation for each source is then obtained by defining the 1-D MUSIC spectrum. Simulation results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

A spectrum sensing scheme for cognitive radio that includes coarse and fine sensing stages based on cyclostationarity is proposed in this paper. The cyclostationary feature detection (CFD) based on a single cyclic frequency (SCF) is used in the coarse sensing stage and that based on multiple cyclic frequencies (MCF) is employed in the fine sensing stage. Whether the fine sensing stage is performed or not is decided by comparing the statistic constructed in the coarse sensing stage with two thresholds. Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the proposed sensing scheme has superior sensing performance and needs shorter sensing time.