The paper presents a computer program for the calculation of contact mass loss in the case of evaporation, ablation and melting. It makes use of theoretical mathematical equations previously published by a lot of researchers. For the purposes of the program, an expert system algorithm was designed. The paper presents results obtained by means of the proposed program for silver, tungsten and copper.

In orthogonal frequency-division multiplex access (OFDMA) uplink, the carrier-frequency offsets (CFOs) between the multiple transmitters and the receiver introduce inter-carrier interference (ICI) and severely degrade the performance. In this paper, based on the perfect estimation of each user's CFO, we propose two low-complexity iterative algorithms to cancel ICI due to CFOs, which are denoted as the basic algorithm and the improved algorithm with decision-feedback equalization (DFE), respectively. For the basic one, two theorems are proposed that yield a sufficient condition for the convergence of iterations. Moreover, the interference-power-evolution (IPE) charts are proposed to evaluate the convergence behavior of this interference cancellation algorithm. Motivated by the IPE chart, the procedure of DFE is introduced into the iterations, which is the basic idea of the improved algorithm. For this improved algorithm, the error-propagation effect are analyzed and suppressed by an efficient stopping criterion. From IPE charts and simulation results, it can be easily observed that the basic algorithm has the same capability of ICI cancellation as the linear optimal minimum mean square error (MMSE) method, but offers lower complexity, while the improved algorithm with DFE outperforms the MMSE method in terms of the bit-error rate (BER) performance.

We study the problem of optimizing admission control policies in mobile multimedia cellular networks when predictive information regarding movement is available and we evaluate the gains that can be achieved by making such predictive information available to the admission controller. We consider a general class of prediction agents which forecast the number of future handovers and we evaluate the impact on performance of aspects like: whether the prediction refers to incoming and/or outgoing handovers, inaccurate predictions, the anticipation of the prediction and the way that predictions referred to different service classes are aggregated. For the optimization process we propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach based on the concept of afterstates. The proposed approach, when compared with conventional Reinforcement Learning, yields better solutions and with higher precision. Besides it tackles more efficiently the curse of dimensionality inherent to multimedia scenarios. Numerical results show that the performance gains measured are higher when more specific information is provided about the handover time instants, i.e. when the anticipation time is deterministic instead of stochastic. It is also shown that the utilization of the network is maintained at very high values, even when the highest improvements are observed. We also compare an optimal policy obtained deploying our approach with a previously proposed heuristic prediction scheme, showing that plenty of room for technological innovation exists.

While efficient use of network resources is an important control objective of call admission control (CAC), the issue of fairness among services should also be taken into account. Game theory provides a suitable framework for formulating such fair and efficient CAC problem. Thus, in this paper, a game theoretic framework for selecting fair-efficient threshold parameters of CAC for the asymmetrical traffic case in CDMA mobile multimedia systems is proposed. For the cooperative game, the arbitration schemes for the interpersonal comparisons of utility and the bargaining problem, including the Nash, Raiffa, and modified Thomson solutions, are investigated. Furthermore, since CAC should be simple and flexible to provide a fast response to diverse QoS call requests during a connection setup, this paper also applies the concept of load factor to the previous Jeon and Jeong's CAC scheme and proposes an approximation approach to reduce the computational complexity (proposed throughput-based CAC scheme). From the numerical results, the proposed throughput-based CAC scheme shows a comparable performance to the previous Jeon and Jeong's CAC scheme while achieving lower computational complexity. All the solutions attain the fairness by satisfying their different fairness senses and efficiency by the Pareto optimality.

A new hybrid model to calculate echoes and ultrasonic fields scattered by flaws is presented. In this model, transmitted fields by a transducer and fields scattered by flaws are calculated using the Rayleigh integral and the FDTD method, respectively. Received echo signals by the transducer are obtained by the inner product of the transmitted fields and the scattered ones at each grid for the FDTD method, and integrating those in a calculation area. Since the calculation area for the FDTD method can be limited around flaws, the calculation time is short and computer memory usage can be reduced. Experiments are done for two types of test object to confirm the validity of the hybrid model. As a result, experimental results are in good agreement with calculated ones.

The ESIGN signature scheme was initially proposed in 1985. Since then, several variants have been proposed, but only a few have been formally supported using the methodology of provable security. In addition, these schemes are different from the ESIGN-PSS signature scheme submitted to ISO/IEC-14888-2 for standardization. It is believed that ESIGN-PSS is secure against the chosen-message attack, however, there has not yet been any report verifying this belief. This paper presents the security proofs of ESIGN-PSS and a variant of this scheme, denoted ESIGN-PSS-R, which is a signature scheme comprising the ESIGN signature mechanism and the PSS-R mechanism.

This paper proposes a co-channel interference (CCI) suppression scheme employing a frequency-domain nulling filter and turbo equalizer for single-carrier uplink time division multiple access (TDMA) systems. In the proposed scheme, after the received signal is transformed into a frequency-domain signal via fast Fourier transform (FFT), CCI from an adjacent cell is suppressed by the nulling filter. Moreover, the proposed scheme employs a soft canceller and minimum mean square error (SC/MMSE) based turbo equalizer to suppress the performance degradation due to inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by the nulling filter as well as the ISI induced by fading channel. Computer simulation confirms that the proposed scheme is effective in suppression of CCI compared to the conventional linear frequency-domain equalizer.

This letter presents an improved visible watermarking scheme for halftone images. It incorporates watermark embedding into ordered dither halftoning by threshold modulation. The input images include a continuous-tone host image (e.g. an 8-bit gray level image) and a binary watermark image, and the output is a halftone image with a visible watermark. Our method is content adaptive because it takes local intensity information of the host image into account. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed technique. It can be used in practical applications for halftone images, such as commercial advertisement, content annotation, copyright announcement, etc.

The traffic with asymmetry between uplink and downlink has recently been getting remarkable on mobile communication systems providing multimedia communication services. In the future mobile communications, the accommodation of asymmetric traffic is essential to realize efficient multimedia mobile communication systems. This paper discusses asymmetric traffic accommodation in CDMA/FDD cellular packet communication systems and proposes its efficient scheme using an adaptive cell sizing technique. In the proposed scheme, each base station autonomously controls its coverage area so that almost the same communication quality can be achieved across the service area under the asymmetric traffic conditions. We present some numerical examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by using computer simulation. The simulation results show that, under asymmetric traffic conditions, the proposed scheme can provide fair communication quality across the service area in both links and can improve total transmission capacity in the uplink.

The sputter erosion of arcing contacts is a very complex phenomenon, which is determined by the interaction between electromagnetic force, heat conduction and surface tension of liquid metal. A new model for evaluating the sputter erosion of electrodes is described in this paper, which is based on the electromagnetic forces against the molten pool, flowing velocity, kinetic energy and the surface tension of the molten pool. Erosion tests on AgSnO2, AgNi10 and AgNi0.15 contacts under the loads of resistance, lamp and inductance respectively at 14 VDC have been carried out. Experimental results indicate good agreement with the model's simulation. The model shows how the current and density, specific heat and other parameters of material affect the erosion rate.

For the optimization design of air circuit breaker (ACB), it is important and necessary to calculate the electro-dynamic repulsion force acting on the movable contact. A method based on 3-D FEM with the equations that describe the relationships among current, magnetic field and repulsion force, which takes the ferromagnet into account, is adopted to calculate the electro-dynamic repulsion force. The method enables one to analyze the factors that affect the electro-dynamic repulsion force, including the number of the movable conductor parallel branches as well as the location of the axis and the shape of the flexible connection. The discussion of the calculation results is also presented in this paper.

A method for flexibly allocating and reallocating optical access network (OAN) resources, including fibers and equipment, using the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is described. OAN resource allocation during service delivery provisioning involves various input conditions and allocation sequences, so an OAN resource allocation method has to support various workflow patterns. Furthermore, exception processing, such as reallocating OAN resources once they are allocated, is inevitable, especially during the spread of service using optical fiber and during the deployment of an optical access network. However, it is almost impossible to describe all workflow patterns including exception processes. Improving the efficiency of these exception processes, as well as that of the typical processes, is important for reducing the service delivery time. Describing all these patterns and process flows increases development cost. The CSP can be used to search for solutions without having to fix the process sequence and input conditions beforehand. We have formulated the conditions for OAN resource allocation and reallocation as a CSP. Use of this method makes it possible to handle various allocation workflow patterns including exception processes. Evaluation of the solution search time demonstrated its feasibility.

Recent theoretical and experimental studies indicate that spatial multiplexing (SM) systems have enormous potential for increasing the capacity of corresponding multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channels in rich scattering environments. In this paper, we propose a new recursion based algorithm for Bell Labs layered space time (BLAST) signal detection in SM systems. The new algorithm uses an inflated recursion in the initialization and a deflated recursion in the iteration stage: as a result, the complexity is greatly reduced and the irregularity issues are completely avoided. Compared with the conventional fastest recursive approach, the complexity of our proposal is lower by a factor of 2 and it is also very implementation friendly.

Cooperative communication enables single antenna to realize a virtual multiple antenna by sharing their antennas. Therefore, it offers transmit diversity. In this letter, we apply pre-coding scheme to the transmit symbols. Although pre-coding has shortcomings, it is possible to employ Space-Time Block Codes (STBC) with single antenna and achieve high gain.

This paper presents the implementation of a 31-tap FIR Hilbert transform digital filter chip used in the digital-IF receivers, to confirm the effectiveness of our new design method. Our design method that we previously reported is based on a computation sharing multiplier using a new horizontal and vertical common subexpression techniques. A 31-tap FIR Hilbert transform digital filter was implemented and fabricated in 0.35 µm CMOS standard cell library. The chip's core contains approximately 33k transistors and occupies 0.86 mm2. The chip also has an operating speed of 70 MHz over. The implementation results show that the proposed Hilbert transformer has a smallest cost factor and so that is a high performance filter.

The performance of TCP data transmission deteriorates significantly when a TCP connection traverses a heterogeneous network consisting of wired and wireless links. This is mainly because of packet losses caused by the high bit error rate of wireless links. We proposed receiver-based ACK splitting mechanism in [1]. It is a new mechanism to improve the performance of TCP over wired and wireless heterogeneous networks. Our mechanism employs a receiver-based approach, which does not need modifications to be made to the sender TCP or the base station. It uses the ACK-splitting method for increasing the congestion window size quickly in order to restrain the throughput degradation caused by packet losses due to the high bit error rate of wireless links. In this paper, we develop a mathematical analysis method to derive the throughput of a TCP connection, with/without our mechanism, which traverses wired and wireless heterogeneous networks. By using the analysis results, we evaluate the effectiveness of our mechanism in the network where both of packet losses due to network congestion and those caused by the high bit error rate of wireless links take place. Through An evaluation of the proposed method shows that it can give a good estimation of TCP throughput under the mixture networks of wired/wireless links. We also find that the larger the bandwidth of the wireless link is, the more effective our mechanism becomes, therefore, the mechanism's usability will increase in the future as wireless networks become faster.

The conventional successive adaptive loading algorithm, represented by Hughes-Hartogs algorithm, can be used to reduce the transmit power of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. However, two major disadvantages exist for this kind of algorithm: One is the long loading time delay caused by the bit-to-bit loading, i.e., only one bit is loaded in every iteration; the other is that there is no flexibility in freely pre-defining the candidate modulation set before the loading is finished. In order to solve these problems, we propose the low-loading-delay parallel adaptive loading algorithms aiming at reducing the transmit power under the condition that the data throughput and error rate are maintained to target values. Two improvements are achieved by the new algorithm. One is that it divides the successive adaptive loading into several independent small-scale loading (SS-Loading) procedures. "SS-Loading" can be performed in parallel mode. To support this, we propose two subband division methods (successive and sorted subband divisions). The simulation results show that for a large range of subband number (1-128), the loading time delay can be remarkably decreased (especially for the parallel adaptive loading based on sorted subband division, i.e., SRT parallel adaptive loading algorithm) with neglectable power efficiency loss, compared with Hughes-Hartogs algorithm. The second improvement is that the new algorithm allows us to pre-define the candidate modulation set, which provide flexibility for the system design, e.g. we can exclude those rarely used modulation modes. We also reveal that Hughes-Hartogs algorithm is actually a special case of the newly proposed algorithm.

This paper describes a morpheme-based pronunciation model that is especially useful to develop the pronunciation lexicon for Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) in Korean. To address pronunciation variation in Korean, we analyze phonological rules based on phonemic contexts together with morphological category and morpheme boundary information. Since the same phoneme sequences can be pronounced in different ways at across morpheme boundary, incorporating morphological environment is required to manipulate pronunciation variation modeling. We implement a rule-based pronunciation variants generator to produce a pronunciation lexicon with context-dependent multiple variants. At the lexical level, we apply an explicit modeling of pronunciation variation to add pronunciation variants at across morphemes as well as within morpheme into the pronunciation lexicon. At the acoustic level, we train the phone models with re-labeled transcriptions through forced alignment using context-dependent pronunciation lexicon. The proposed pronunciation lexicon offers the potential benefit for both training and decoding of a LVCSR system. Subsequently, we perform the speech recognition experiment on read speech task with 34K-morpheme vocabulary. Experiment confirms that improved performance is achieved by pronunciation variation modeling based on morpho-phonological analysis.

This paper describes two different types of GaAs-HBT compatible, base-collector diode 0/20-dB step attenuators--diode-linearizer type and harmonics-trap type--for 3.5-GHz-band wireless applications. The two attenuators use an AC-coupled, stacked type diode switch topology featuring high power handling capability with low bias current operation. Compared to a conventional diode switch topology, this topology can improve the capability of more than 6 dB with the same bias current. In addition, successful incorporation of a shunt diode linearizer and second- and third-harmonic traps into the attenuators gives the IM3 distortion improvement of more than 7 dB in the high power ranging from 16 dBm to 18 dBm even in the 20-dB attenuation mode when IM3 distortion levels are basically easy to degrade. Measurement results show that both the attenuators are capable of delivering power handling capability (P0.2 dB) of more than 18 dBm with IM3 levels of less than -35 dBc at an 18-dBm input power while drawing low bias currents of 3.8 mA and 6.8 mA in the thru and attenuation modes from 0/5-V complementary supplies. Measured insertion losses of the linearizer-type and harmonics-trap type attenuators in the thru mode are as low as 1.4 dB and 2.5 dB, respectively.

The paper presents a method for testing transport of composite contacts materials under electrical arc conditions at high currents and for polarized electrodes. Tests and the discussion of results were carried out for silver-metal, silver-metal oxide and silver-tungsten carbide contact materials. Additionally, tungsten electrode was used as the second contact which was either cathode or anode. Spectrometric analysis of arc erosion components transported onto the second electrode and into the surroundings was carried out.