A simple configuration for millimeter-wave fiber-wireless transmission, with remote local-oscillator (LO) delivery from the central office, both for the uplink and for the downlink, and a simple, cost-effective, base-station solution is proposed. Under the assumption of using commercially available components and a conventional single-mode fiber (with dispersion of 17 ps/nm/km at 1.55 µm), our numerical results show that, with a laser linewidth of 150 MHz, a laser power of 0 dBm and an optical gain of only 6 dB, it is possible to transmit, without repeaters, data rates of 622 Mbit/s across about 18 km at a bit-error-rate of 10-9. By increasing the optical gain to 24 dB, the link length can be increased to approximately 67 km for a laser linewidth of 75 MHz and to 78 km for a laser linewidth 1 MHz.

Large number of electronic connectors are widely used in various electronic and telecommunication systems. No matter whether it is optical telecommunications or mobile phone systems, connectors are important links for electronics. Unfortunately connector contacts are exposed in air, they are different from any other electronic components, the contacts are greatly influenced by the environment where they operate. In China, dust and corrosion products are the main contaminants to cause contact failure. Evidently the failed contacts seriously deteriorate the reliability of electronic and telecommunication systems. This paper summarizes the recent achievements obtained by our Lab on the effect of dust and corrosion products to the connector contact failure. Since dust contamination is a very complex problem which is not only popular in China, but also happened in many countries. Continuous studies will be very useful to improve the contact reliability of connectors, setting up new and effective testing methods and standards, building up experimental and computer simulation systems.

Two implementation schemes for a two-step SOVA (Soft Output Viterbi Algorithm) decoder are proposed and verified in a chip. One uses the combination of trace back (TB) logic to find the survivor state and double trace back logic to find the weighting factor of a two-step SOVA. The other is that the reliability values are divided by a scaling factor in order to compensate for the distortion brought by overestimating those values in SOVA. We introduced a fixed scaling factor of 0.25 or 0.33 for a rate 1/3 and designed an 8-state Turbo decoder with a 256-bit frame size to lower the reliability values. The implemented architecture of the two-step SOVA decoder allows important savings in area and high-speed processing compared with the one-step SOVA decoder using register exchange (RE) or trace-back (TB) method. The chip is fabricated using 0.65 µm gate array at Samsung Electronics and it shows higher SNR performance by 2 dB at the BER 10-4 than that of a two-step SOVA decoder without a scaling factor.

The demand for wireless mobile communications has grown at a very high rate, recently. In order to solve the non-uniform traffic rates, the use of cell splits is unavoidable for balancing the traffic rate and maximizing total system capacity. For cell planning, a DS-CDMA cellular system can be comprise of different cell sizes because of different demands and population density of the service area. In this paper, we develop a general model to study the forward link capacity and outage probability of a DS-CDMA cellular system with mixed cell sizes. The analysis of outage probability is carried out using the log-normal approximation. When a macrocell is split into the three microcells, as an example, we calculate the multi-cross interferences between macrocells and microcells, and the forward link capacities for the microcells and the neighboring macrocells. The maximum allowable capacity plane for macrocell and microcell is also investigated. The numerical results and discussions with previous published results of reverse link are summarized.

In this paper, we first investigate the characteristics of movie contents over the Internet. As in the previous studies, we found the lognormal-distribution well fits the distribution of file size for the whole set of general movie contents. When we specifically focus on the subset that consists of movie trailers, however, it shows different distribution from the lognormal-distribution. Our analysis shows it is similar to an exponential-distribution. We here assume that movie trailers are one of the relevant contents for Contents Delivery Networks (CDN) or Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file exchange communities. We further studies the relationship between playing duration and file size for the movie trailers and we did not find any linear correlation among them. We next consider bandwidth requirements to retrieve movie trailer contents. Our objective is to make it possible for user to view the contents in real-time. Many previous studies investigate bandwidth requirement based only on the file size distribution. In this paper, we analyze the traffic design criteria for CDN or P2P by taking into account both of the results for the file size distribution and the relationship between playing duration and file size for movie trailers. Simulation studies reveal the impact for the bandwidth requirement.

In this paper, we propose an algorithm that automatically generates the intermediate scenes using the bidirectional disparity morphing (BDM) from the parallel stereo images. The two-step search strategy is used for speeding up the computation of the bidirectional disparity map and three occluding patterns are used for smoothing the computed disparities more elaborately. Using the bidirectional disparity map, we interpolate the left and the right image to their intermediate scenes. Then we dissolve two interpolated images into the desired intermediate scene which the holes are removed and the effect of the disparity estimation errors is minimized. We implemented the proposed algorithm on TM1300 supported by TriMedia using pSOSytem which enables to do multiprocessing. As a result, we can interpolate the high-quality intermediate scenes with real-time process.

This paper deals with a design problem of a robust controller which achieves not only robust stability but also a performance robustness for linear systems with structured uncertainties satisfying matching condition. The performance robustness means that comparing the transient behavior of the uncertain system with a desired one generated by the nominal system, the deterioration of control performance is suppressed. In this approach, the control law consists of a state feedback with the fixed gain designed by using the nominal system, a state feedback with an adaptive gain determined by a parameter adjustment law and a compensation input for the purpose of keeping transient behavior as closely as possible to the desirable one. We show the parameter adjustment law in order to guarantee robust stability and that the condition for the existence of the compensation input is equivalent to the Riccati equation for the standard linear quadratic control problem. Finally, numerical examples are presented.

To recover the lost packets in VoIP systems, we propose a dynamic redundant audio transmission mechanism that responds to network status. A receiver computes the QoS information using timestamps and sequence numbers in RTP headers and sends the information to a sender using the RTCP protocol. The sender transmits redundant audio packets to the receiver to recover the lost packets. Experimental results show that the rate of recovering the lost packets is 63% in case of consecutive packet loss and is 42% in case of non-consecutive packet loss.

Some electromechanical devices and systems produced using MEMS fabrication processes are detailed. Two precision measurement metrologies for inspecting electromechanical products are also described. As the trend of electromechanical devices has been towards smaller and smaller sizes possessing robust mechanisms and powerful functions, micro-electric-mechanical system (MEMS) devices are becoming more the choice for meeting such requirements. Three MEMS examples are discussed in detail in this paper: CMOS compatible sensors, RF/microwave components, and packaged and integrated passive devices. The design thinking of a new free-fall sensor, which is an accelerometer and possesses a surprisingly low frequency response and broad bandwidth, is mentioned. In addition, an AVID (dvanced ibrometer/nterferometer evice) system for measuring tiny displacement as well as a Morphinscope system that has the advantage of a confocal microscope combined with a photon tunneling microscope and both developed by NTU's MEMS/NEMS group, are discussed. The excellent sensing ability of the free-fall sensor and the accuracy resolution of the two measurement systems are proved by experimental verification.

This Letter proposes a timer based ordered registration (TBOR) scheme for CDMA private user zone (PUZ) service. The proposed TBOR scheme solves the problem that both the PUZ system loads and the public system loads are increased due to excessive registration. Also the TBOR scheme is quite simple to implement and compatible with the existing public CDMA system.

In this paper, we analyze wavelet-based coding in a rate-distortion (R-D) sense by using Laplacian and Markov models and verify the results with the performance of the typical embedded coders, EZW and SPIHT, and the non-embedded coder implemented here. Laplacian represents the probability density function (pdf) of wavelet coefficients and Markov statistical dependency within and among subbands. The models allow us to easily understand the behavior of a thresholding and quantization part and a lossless coding part and associate the embedded coders with the nonembedded coder, which is the point the paper approaches. The analytic results are shown to coincide well with the actual coding results.

This paper proposes an enhanced method for multiple description coding (MDC) using whitening transform. The MDC using correlating transform is an error resilient coding technique that explicitly adds correlation between two descriptions to enable the estimation of one set from the other when one set is dropped in channel. This paper proposes a method to overcome practical problems that decoder must know statistics of original image in the conventional correlating transform method. The MDC using whitening transform does not need additional statistical information to reconstruct a image because the coefficients whitening transformed have uni-variance statistics. Our experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a good trade-off between the coding efficiency and the reconstruction quality. We obtain that PSNR of image reconstructed from two descriptions is about 0.93 dB higher at the 1.0BPP and PSNR from only one description is about 1.88 dB higher than conventional method at the same rate of 'Lena' image.

Telecom- and Signal Relays with gastight plastic sealed housings enables the usage of inert and highly insulating gases. Although plastic sealed housings are used, optimized designs can keep the gas during the entire life of more than 25 years. The application of this technology allows the application of highly insulting gases like SF6 and result in a significant reduction of the relay size as reduced physical dimensions can be applied. With unchanged distances a significantly better dielectric performance can be achieved, without a relevant cost increase. Furthermore the inert switching atmosphere increases the switching characteristics or reduces the consumption of precious metals for the contacts. Even the usage of less precious metals like tungsten or ruthenium might be possible for switching typical telecommunication signals.

A new power and bandwidth efficient modulation technique - Superposed Quadrature Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (SQ2AM) - for use in nonlinear satellite channel is presented. SQ2AM technique expands 2-dimensional SQAM signals into 4-dimensional quadrature modulated signals by using orthogonal baseband waveforms and carriers. The power spectrum and BER performance of SQ2AM are analyzed and compared with those of QPSK, SQAM and Q2PSK in a nonlinearly amplified multi-channel environment.

A novel postprocessing algorithm for concealing spatial block errors in block-based coded images is proposed using block classification with a variable operating region (VOR). In the proposed algorithm, a missing block is classified as flat, edge, or complex based on local information from the surrounding blocks which is extracted using a Sobel operation in a VOR. In this case, the VOR is determined adaptively according to the number of edge directions in the missing block. Using the classification, the flat blocks are then concealed by the linear interpolation (LI) method, the edge blocks are concealed by the boundary multi-directional interpolation (BMDI) method, and the complex blocks are concealed by a combined linear interpolation and boundary matching (CLIBM) method. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm improved the PSNR and visual quality of the concealment for both original images and JPEG compressed images, and produced better results than conventional algorithms.

This paper presents a modified microwave radio-thermometer (MRTM) with material characteristic estimator and multiple temperature conversion tables to measure subcutaneous temperature of a living body. This estimator provides a temperature retrieval unit with material characteristics such as permittivity, conductivity, thickness and geometry of the living body. The temperature retrieval unit with multiple temperature conversion tables can select one of the tables and compute temperature value corresponding to measured radiation power. In the experiments, it was shown that the radio-thermometer could reduce measurement errors of about 0.82 to 7.68 for the cases of distilled water and mixed liquid # 5 with thickness of 29.5 cm and 9.5 cm at the temperature of 37.

We have formed simple polarization-controller arrays by inserting liquid crystal (LC) in trenches cut across planar lightwave circuits (PLCs). We fabricated LC layers for use as polarization controllers on PLCs in two ways; in one, the ultra-thin layer of LC is held in a cell that is inserted into a trench on the PLC while in the other, the trench is directly filled with the LC. The ultra-thin LC cell can change the phase of 1.55-µm light from 0 to 3π while the LC filling can change the phase of light at the same wavelength from 0 to 12π below 5Vrms. Two former parallel-aligned ultra-thin LC cells, where the directions of alignment of the liquid crystals are rotated by 45 relative to each other, are capable of converting light with an arbitrary input polarization to TE or TM polarization. Ultra-thin cells of twisted nematic LC can switch the polarization between TE and TM modes with an extinction ratio of -15dB. The array we fabricated had a pitch of 1 mm and 5 elements, but an array with more than 100 elements and a pitch below 125µm will easily be possible by using finely patterned transparent electrodes. We have also applied our techniques to the fabrication of LC-based variable optical attenuators (VOA) on the PLC.

In this paper we present reconfigurable computing as a compelling choice of computing platform for real-time, onboard processing for satellite applications. In particular, we discuss the use of reconfigurable computing in the context of a real-time remote sensing system, providing motivation for such a system and describing attributes of reconfigurable computing that support it as the technology of choice. The High Performance Computing (HPC-I) payload, designed and developed for the Australian scientific satellite FedSat, is introduced as a demonstration of onboard processing in space using reconfigurable logic. We present an overview of the real-time remote sensing system architecture, and describe the design and implementation of three remote sensing algorithms in HPC-I for cloud masking, wildfire detection and volcanic plume detection. Finally, results from simulation and testing are presented which show very promising performance in terms of data throughput and detection capabilities.

In this paper, we propose a new transmitter diversity. We propose a combined system with path diversity gain of the distributed antennas and frequency diversity gain of the multi-carrier. The proposed system transmits different data using several sub-carriers which are correlated, while, transmitting the same data using several sub-carriers which are decorrelated. It can achieve combined path and frequency diversity in a variable frequency selective fading channel. It provides high data rate services by transmitting the different data using each correlated carrier, and supports good quality by transmitting the same data on decorrelated carriers using multiple antennas. The proposed system is applicable to multimedia service and can achieve high quality according to channel condition. Thus, the proposed system is sufficiently flexible enough to very support a variety of video, image, voice and data services at a high level of quality.

A novel optical packet switch architecture is proposed that can support simultaneous processing and routing of packets in bands, without disturbing the granularity of the system. The packet router consists of a waveband converter and an AWG, combined in such a way that processing and switching of packets within and between the wavebands is allowed. The waveband converter is based on four-wave mixing in semiconductor optical amplifiers. Experimental results of the waveband conversion technique are presented to prove the feasibility of such a scheme. Simulation results of an 12 packet router are used to explain the operation of such a subsystem for a synchronous optical packet switched network.