In this paper, we propose three techniques to improve the performance of YAFFS (Yet Another Flash File System), while enhancing the reliability of the system. Specifically, we first propose to manage metadata and user data separately on segregated blocks. This modification not only leads to the reduction of the mount time but also reduces the garbage collection time. Second, we tailor the wear-leveling to the segregated metadata and user data blocks. That is, worn out blocks between the segregated blocks are swapped, which leads to more evenly worn out blocks increasing the lifetime of the system. Finally, we devise an analytic model to predict the expected garbage collection time. By accurately predicting the garbage collection time, the system can perform garbage collection at more opportune times when the user's perceived performance may not be negatively affected. Performance evaluation results based on real implementations show that our modifications enhance performance and reliability without incurring additional overheads. Specifically, the YAFFS with our proposed techniques outperforms the original YAFFS by six times in terms of mount speed and five times in terms of benchmark performance, while reducing the average erase count of blocks by 14%.

With advances in communication technologies, network services provided via the Internet have become widely diversified, and people can use these services not only via wired networks but also via wireless networks. There are several wireless systems in practical use such as cellular, WiMAX and WiFi. Although these wireless network systems have developed independently of each other, they should be integrated for seamless access by users. However, each system uses an individual spectrum prescribed by law to avoid radio interference. To overcome such a situation, dynamic spectrum access technology is receiving much attention. We propose a dynamic spectrum assignment method in which a WiFi system temporarily uses a spectrum band of the WiMAX system in WiFi/WiMAX integrated networks to reduce call blocking probability of multimedia communication services. We confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by simulation experiments.

We propose a novel technique to grow the single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) with specific chirality at the desired position using free electron laser (FEL) irradiation during growth and surface treatment. As a result, only the semiconducting SWNTs grew at the area between triangle electrodes, where the ozone treatment was done to be hydrophilic when an alcohol chemical vapor deposition (ACCVD) process was carried out with the 800 nm FEL irradiation. Although the number of possible chiral index is 22 in the SWNTs grown without the FEL irradiation, the number is much reduced to be 8 by the FEL.

In spectrum sensing, if the primary user (PU) signal and the channel noise both follow Gaussian distribution and neither of their probability distribution functions (PDFs) are known, the traditional approaches based on entropy or Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) etc., become infeasible. To address this problem, we propose a spectrum sensing method that exploits the similarity of PDFs of two time-adjacent detected data sets with cross entropy, while accounting for achieving the detection performance of LRT which is Neyman-Pearson optimal in detecting the primary user. We show that the detection performance of the proposed method asymptotically approximates that of LRT in detecting the PU. The simulation results confirm our analysis.

This letter proposes a spread spectrum audio watermarking robust against playback speed modification (PSM) attack which introduces both time-scale modification and pitch shifting. Two important improvements are exploited to achieve this robustness. The first one is selecting an embedding region according to the stable characteristic of the audio energy. The second one is stretching the pseudo-random noise sequence to match the length of the embedding region before embedding and detection. Experimental results show that our method is highly robust to common audio signal processing attacks and synchronization attacks including PSM, cropping, trimming and jittering.

Ridge optical waveguides (OWGs) of fluorinated polyimides were deposited on a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM), and a hybrid sensor employing the OWG spectroscopy and the QCM technique was prepared. A polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) film with CoCl2 was deposited on the OWG, and humidity sensing characteristics were investigated. White light was entered into the waveguide and the output light spectra was observed. The output light intensity markedly changed because of the chromism of CoCl2 by humidity sorption. During the output light measurement, the QCM frequency was monitored simultaneously. The humidity dependences of the QCM frequency and output light were also investigated in a range from 10% to 70%. Furthermore, the response to hydrofluoroether (HFE) was observed, and the change in the output light was hardly observed because CoCl2 does not exhibit chromism in HFE sorption.

A Wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) system that uses spectrum-sliced broadband incoherent light is attractive because it avoids the cost of operating/administering wavelengths in optical network units (ONU) at customer premises. However, it is difficult to enhance the spectrum efficiency to ensure a sufficient signal to noise ratio because it would demand broad channel width. To overcome this problem, we proposed a spectrum-interleaved duplex technique. It enables upstream and downstream communications to share one channel by using a cyclic filter. This sharing of one channel eliminates the need for a guard interval between signal lights duplexed in the channel. One residual issue regarding single band transmission is its robustness to reflection in the transmission medium. To increase the reflection robustness of the spectrum-interleaved duplex scheme, we propose a reflection remover based on an optical code division multiplexing technique. We also evaluate the extent to which capacity of the spectrum efficiency of the spectrum-interleaved duplex WDM-PON system that uses spectrum-sliced broadband incoherent light can be increased.

In non-cooperative scenarios, the estimation of direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS) signals has to be done in a blind manner. In this letter, we consider the spreading sequence estimation problem for DS-SS signals. First, the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of spreading sequence is derived, then a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) approach is proposed to cope with the exponential complexity of performing MLE. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides significant performance improvements compared to existing methods, especially in the case of low numbers of data samples and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) situations.

We propose a simple approximate model for unslotted opportunistic spectrum access networks under nonsaturation conditions. The main simplification we introduce is that all secondary users, except a tagged one, in nonsaturated setting can be approximated by saturated ones with a scaled version of backoff interval. We analyze the approximate model and verify the model using simulations.

This paper proposes likelihood smoothing techniques to improve decision tree-based acoustic models, where decision trees are used as replacements for Gaussian mixture models to compute the observation likelihoods for a given HMM state in a speech recognition system. Decision trees have a number of advantageous properties, such as not imposing restrictions on the number or types of features, and automatically performing feature selection. This paper describes basic configurations of decision tree-based acoustic models and proposes two methods to improve the robustness of the basic model: DT mixture models and soft decisions for continuous features. Experimental results for the Aurora 2 speech database show that a system using decision trees offers state-of-the-art performance, even without taking advantage of its full potential and soft decisions improve the performance of DT-based acoustic models with 16.8% relative error rate reduction over hard decisions.

The multiple-access channel (MAC) becomes very popular in various communication systems, because multi-terminal communication systems have been widely used in practical systems, e.g., mobile phones and P2P, etc. For some MACs, it is known that feedback can enlarge the capacity region, where the capacity region is the set of rate pairs such that the error probability can be made arbitrarily small for sufficiently large block length. The capacity region for general MACs, which are not required to satisfy ergodicity and stationarity with perfect feedback was first shown by Tatikonda and Mitter without the proof, where perfect feedback means that the channel output is perfectly fed back to senders. In this paper, we generalize Tatikonda and Mitter's result to the case of deterministic feedback, where the values of deterministic functions of past channel outputs is fed back to senders. We show that the capacity region for general MACs with deterministic feedback can be represented by the information-spectrum formula introduced by Han and Verdu, and directed information introduced by Massey. We also investigate the compound MAC problem, the ε-coding problem, the strong converse property and the cost constraint problem for general MACs with deterministic feedback.

In information-spectrum methods proposed by Han and Verdu, quantities defined by using the limit superior (or inferior) in probability play crucial roles in many problems in information theory. In this paper, we introduce two nonconventional quantities defined in probabilistic ways. After clarifying basic properties of these quantities, we show that the two quantities have operational meaning in the ε-coding problem of a general source in the ordinary and optimistic senses. The two quantities can be used not only for obtaining variations of the strong converse theorem but also establishing upper and lower bounds on the width of the entropy-spectrum. We also show that the two quantities are expressed in terms of the smooth Renyi entropy of order zero.

Dynamic spectrum allocation (DSA) based on secondary spectrum market is considered a promising technology to improve spectrum utilization efficiency and to relieve the wireless spectrum shortage problem. We propose a dynamic spectrum allocation algorithm named market equilibrium and game (MEG), and construct a complete secondary spectrum market. The market based on the MEG algorithm consists of two submarkets: multiple primary services providers (PSPs) and a dynamic spectrum allocation server (DSAS) form the high submarket, while the low submarket is composed of the DSAS and a number of secondary users. In the low submarket, the MEG algorithm provides a game type selection strategy. By this strategy, the DSAS can win more payoffs with lower unit spectrum price, which encourages secondary users to use more spectrum. A secondary user can also choose its preferable game type between dynamic game and Nash bargaining flexibly. On the other hand, a bargaining procedure in the high submarket is designed in the MEG algorithm to ensure that market equilibrium is quickly reached. A performance analysis shows that the strategy of game type selection is fair and feasible for both the DSAS and the secondary users. Moreover, the bargaining procedure is better than the existing algorithm which adjusts price step by step in the high submarket. Simulation results also demonstrate that the market fluctuation in the low submarket is passed to the high submarket by way of the DSAS. The MEG algorithm can effectively satisfy the highly-fluctuating demands from the secondary users. In addition, the MEG algorithm can improve the payoffs of all players and increase spectrum utilization efficiency.

A 12 Gb/s 10-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) serial-link transmitter was implemented using a 0.18 µm CMOS process. The proposed 10-PAM transmitter achieves a channel efficiency of 4 bit/symbol by dual-mode amplitude modulations using 10 differential-mode levels and 3 common-mode levels. The measured maximum data-rate was 12 Gb/s over 0.7-m cable and 2-cm printed circuit board (PCB) traces. The entire transmitter consumes 432 mW such that the figure of merit of the transmitter is 36 pJ/bit. The present work demonstrates the greater channel efficiency of 4 bit/symbol than the currently reported multi-level PAM transmitters.

Solution-based organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) with low parasitic capacitance have been fabricated using a self-aligned method. The self-aligned processes using a cross-linking polymer gate insulator allow fabricating electrically stable polymer OFETs with small overlap area between the source-drain electrodes and the gate electrode, whose frequency characteristics have been investigated by impedance spectroscopy (IS). The IS of polymer OFETs with self-aligned electrodes reveals frequency-dependent channel formation process and the frequency response in FET structure.

In this paper, we present a cognitive relay network with two primary transceivers that communicate via several distributed relay terminals. Spectrum sensing is deployed at the relays to sense the absence/presence of the primary transceivers based on energy detection. The primary network utilizes a two-step two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme by using the cognitive radio (CR) terminals as its relay nodes when the primary network is not in operation, in contrast, the CRs communicate with their own base station (BS). In the first relaying step, the primary transceivers send their signal to the CRs/relays. Distributed beamforming is then performed in the second relaying step. Our aim is to set the beamforming weights so as to minimize the total power dissipated in the relay network while satisfying a target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the primary transceivers and at the cognitive BS. This is achieved by solving an optimization problem that we formulate as a nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP). This problem is solved efficiently by semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and Lagrangian duality. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed technique, compared to classical beamforming techniques, in terms of power reduction.

Concomitantly with the progress of wireless communications, cognitive radio has attracted attention as a solution for depleted frequency bands. Cognitive radio is suitable for wireless sensor networks because it reduces collisions and thereby achieves energy-efficient communication. To make cognitive radio practical, we propose a low-power multi-resolution spectrum sensing (MRSS) architecture that has flexibility in sensing frequency bands. The conventional MRSS scheme consumes much power and can be adapted only slightly to process scaling because it comprises analog circuits. In contrast, the proposed architecture carries out signal processing in a digital domain and can detect occupied frequency bands at multiple resolutions and with low power. Our digital MRSS module can be implemented in 180-nm and 65-nm CMOS processes using Verilog-HDL. We confirmed that the processes respectively dissipate 9.97 mW and 3.45 mW.

We present an improvement to the existing steganography-based bandwidth extension scheme. Enhanced WB (wideband) speech quality is achieved by embedding multiple highband spectral gains into a G.711 bitstream. The number of spectral gains is selected by optimizing the quantity of the embedding data with respect to the quality of the extended WB speech. Compared to the existing method, the proposed scheme improves the WB PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) score by 0.334 with negligible degradation of the embedded narrowband speech.

The measure of the goodness, or inversely the cost, of concatenating synthesis units plays an important role in concatenative speech synthesis. In this paper, we present a probabilistic approach to concatenation modeling in which the goodness of concatenation is measured by the conditional probability of observing the spectral shape of the current candidate unit given the previous unit and the current phonetic context. This conditional probability is modeled by a conditional Gaussian density whose mean vector has a form of linear transform of the past spectral shape. Decision tree-based parameter tying is performed to achieve robust training that balances between model complexity and the amount of training data available. The concatenation models are implemented for a corpus-based speech synthesizer, and the effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed by an objective evaluation as well as a subjective listening test. We also demonstrate that the proposed method generalizes some popular conventional methods in that those methods can be derived as the special cases of the proposed method.

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.