There is still much problem in sizing software despite the existence of well-known software sizing methods such as Function Point method. Many developers still continue to use ad-hoc methods or so called "expert" approaches. This is mainly due to the fact that the existing methods require much information that is difficult to identify or estimate in the early stage of a software project. The accuracy of ad-hoc and "expert" methods also has much problem. The entity-relationship (ER) model is widely used in conceptual modeling (requirements analysis) for data-intensive systems. The characteristic of a data-intensive system, and therefore the source code of its software, is actually well characterized by the ER diagram that models its data. This paper proposes a method for building software size model from extended ER diagram through the use of regression models. We have collected some real data from the industry to do a preliminary validation of the proposed method. The result of the validation is very encouraging.

The effect of the power/ground plane on the through-hole signal via is analyzed in a viewpoint of a band-stop filter. When the through-hole signal via passes through the power/ground plane, the return current path discontinuity of the through-hole signal via occurs due to the high impedance of the power/ground plane. Since the high impedance is produced by the power/ground plane resonance, it acts as a band-stop filter, which is connected to the signal trace in series. Therefore, the power/ground plane filters off its resonance frequency component by absorbing and reflecting from the signal on the through-hole signal via, and consequently the signal distortion, the power/ground plane noise voltage, and the consequent radiated emission occur. With S-parameter and TDR-TDT measurements, the band-stop effect of the power/ground plane on the through-hole signal via is confirmed. And then, this analysis is applied to the clock transmission through the through-hole signal via to obtain the clearer confirmation. The measurements of the distorted clock waveforms, the induced power/ground plane noise voltages, and the radiated emissions depending on the power/ground plane impedance around the through-hole signal via are shown.

When digital broadcasting services are provided through cable television (CATV) networks, viewers watching interactive programs such as quizzes or auctions may respond to the program within a short period. If these responses are transmitted in the upstream channel of the CATV networks using TCP/IP, they will result in burst traffic. The numerous TCP connections will trigger congestion in the upstream transmission facilities and will cause a significant delay in conventional Internet services such as web-browsing. The present paper proposes a new method of controlling the CATV upstream channel to avoid such congestion. We introduce class-based queues at each cable TV station, in which each service class is related to a type of interactive service. The status of the queue is relayed to the cable modems of subscribers using a CATV-specific MAC protocol. This queue-status information is used to suspend further initiation of TCP connections at cable modems. As a result, the TCP connections will be arbitrated in the CATV network, while the delay of the response transmission is traded for smoothing of the burst traffic. We numerically evaluate the effect of the proposed method using the time distribution of responses to an actual quiz program. The results show that the proposed method successfully suppresses interference of the burst traffic with conventional best-effort services.

This letter evaluates the performance of an uplink multicarrier-code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system when the frequency offsets of all users are random variables and the frequency offset for the desired user is compensated. The analysis confirms that performance degradation due to frequency offset is negligible if the estimation error of normalized frequency offset for the desired user is less than 10-1.

This paper presents an even harmonic quadrature mixer (EH-QMIX) with a simple filter configuration and an integrated LTCC module including LNAs, band rejection filters (BRFs), and the proposed EH-QMIX for W-CDMA direct conversion receiver (DCR). Since the DCR has no spurious responses, a BRF instead of a high-Q band pass filter can be applicable for eliminating undesired signals and it can be built in the LTCC substrates easily. As LO frequency is half of RF frequency in the EH-QMIX, diplexer can be composed of simple filters and it can be also integrated in the substrates. As a result, the whole RF circuits of the EH-DCR using a proposed EH-QMIX are integrated in the LTCC module and miniaturization of the receiver is achieved. Moreover, in order to suppress the degradation of the amplitude and the phase imbalances in the quadrature mixer caused by interferences of signals, RF characteristics of the circuits in the mixer such as reflection coefficients, isolations are discussed. A developed LTCC module shows good performances for W-CDMA direct conversion receiver.

We propose a likelihood detection scheme that utilizes ordering and decision of partial bits in MIMO spatial multiplexing systems. We compute BER performance of the proposed detection scheme under Rayleigh fading channels in a 33 MIMO spatial multiplexing system and compare it with BER performance using MLD only and detection utilizing ZF or MMSE only. In addition, the computational complexity of the proposed detection scheme is compared with that of MLD and detection utilizing ZF or MMSE. The results of our investigation show that the proposed detection is a scheme achieves both good BER performance and low computational complexity.

This letter describes unequal-power transmission for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems with a parallel interference canceller (PIC) applied to a maximum likelihood detector (MLD) or complexity-reduced MLD at the receiver. Unequal-power transmission reduces the possibility that all substreams are incorrectly decoded. Canceling the correctly decoded substreams enables more reliable detection in the next stage. The simulation results demonstrated that unequal-power transmission improves the transmission performance of the PIC applied to MLDs or complexity-reduced MLDs, compared with equal-power transmission cases.

This paper proposes a parallel coupled microstrip bandpass filter (BPF) with ring Electromagnetic Bandgap (EBG) cells on the middle layer for spurious suppression. The ring EBG cells of the middle layer add a good stopband-rejection mode to the second harmonics of the parallel coupled microstrip BPF with suppression of over -50 dB, without affecting the center frequency and insertion loss of the original designed BPF. The design of ring EBG cells is presented and verified by the experimented results.

For various applications in image, communications and signal processing, two-dimensional (2-D) generalized orthogonal (GO) sequences, that is, 2-D sequences with zero correlation zone (ZCZ) and 2-D complementary orthogonal (CO) sequences with ZCZ, are widely investigated. New lower bounds for 2-D GO sequences, based on matrix theory on rank, are derived and presented, some examples that attain these lower bounds are given. As a direct application to our results, upper bound on family size of 2-D mutually complementary orthogonal (MCO) codes defined by Luke [9] is proposed.

We theoretically analyze the performance of coherent ultrashort light pulse code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communication systems with a nonlinear optical thresholder. The coherent ultrashort light pulse CDMA is a promising system for an optical local area network (LAN) due to its advantages of asynchronous transmission, high information security, multiple access capability, and optical processing. The nonlinear optical thresholder is based on frequency chirping induced by self-phase modulation (SPM) in optical fiber, and discriminates an ultrashort pulse from multiple access interference (MAI) with picosecond duration. The numerical results show that the thermal noise caused in a photodetector dominates the bit error rate (BER). BER decreases as the fiber length in the nonlinear thresholder and the photocurrent difference in the photodetector increase. Using the nonlinear optical thresholder allows for the response time of the photodetector to be at least 100 times the duration of the ultrashort pulses. We also show that the optimum cut-off frequency at the nonlinear thresholder to achieve the minimum BER increases with fiber length, the total number of users, and the load resistance in the photodetector.

In iterative software development methodology, a version control system is used in order to record and manage modification histories of products such as source codes and models described in diagrams. However, conventional version control systems cannot manage the models as a logical unit because the systems mainly handle source codes. In this paper, we propose a version control technique for handling diagrammatical models as logical units. Then we illustrate the feasibility of our approach with the implementation of version control functions of a meta-CASE tool that is able to generate a modeling tool in order to deal with various diagrams.

This paper presents a test input data compression technique, Selective Low-Care Coding (SLC), which can be used to significantly reduce input test data volume as well as the external test channel requirement for multiscan-based designs. In the proposed SLC scheme, we explored the linear dependencies of the internal scan chains, and instead of encoding all the specified bits in test cubes, only a smaller amount of specified bits are selected for encoding, thus greater compression can be expected. Experiments on the larger benchmark circuits show drastic reduction in test data volume with corresponding savings on test application time can be indeed achieved even for the well-compacted test set.

Displaced subdivision surface representation [13] is a new form of representing a polygonal surface model, where a detailed surface model is defined as a scaler-valued displacement map over a smooth domain surface; it puts forth a number of attractive features for editing, geometry compression, animation, scalability, and adaptive rendering of polygonal models. The construction of the smooth domain surface is a challenging task in the conversion process of a detailed polygonal surface model into this representation. In this paper, we propose a new efficient method for defining the smooth domain surface based on -subdivision scheme. The proposed algorithm not only performs better in terms of the quality of the generated surfaces but is computationally more efficient and occupies less memory as compared to the original algorithm [13] and generates surfaces with more levels of detail due to the specific nature of -subdivision when the prescribed target complexity of the generated mesh must not be exceeded. To corroborate the efficiency and the quality of the new technique, the conversion results for several public domain models have been presented.

This paper presents a high-accuracy 3D (three-dimen-sional) measurement system using multi-camera passive stereo vision to reconstruct 3D surfaces of free form objects. The proposed system is based on an efficient stereo correspondence technique, which consists of (i) coarse-to-fine correspondence search, and (ii) outlier detection and correction, both employing phase-based image matching. The proposed sub-pixel correspondence search technique contributes to dense reconstruction of arbitrary-shaped 3D surfaces with high accuracy. The outlier detection and correction technique contributes to high reliability of reconstructed 3D points. Through a set of experiments, we show that the proposed system measures 3D surfaces of objects with sub-mm accuracy. Also, we demonstrate high-quality dense 3D reconstruction of a human face as a typical example of free form objects. The result suggests a potential possibility of our approach to be used in many computer vision applications.

A novel class of microstrip bandpass filter is configured using the impedance transformers and an improved stepped impedance resonator (SIR). This SIR is composed of a central narrow strip section with an aperture on ground and two wide strip sections at the two sides. This low-high-low SIR resonator has a promising capability in achieving an extremely large ratio of first two resonant frequencies for design of a bandpass filter with ultra-broad stopband. The two quarter-wavelength transformers with low and high impedances, referred as to impedance- and admittance-inverters, are modeled and utilized as alternative types of inductive and capacitive coupling elements with highly tightened degrees for wideband filter design. After extensive investigation is made on the two transformers and the proposed SIR, the two novel bandpass filters are constructed, designed and implemented. Two sets of predicted and measured frequency responses over a wide frequency range both quantitatively exhibit their several attractive features, such as ultra-broad stopband with deep rejection and broadened dominant passband with low insertion loss.

We clarify the effective range of distance between the front and rear images of the depth-fused 3-D (DFD) visual illusion. The DFD visual illusion is perceived when two images with many edges in the front and rear frontal-parallel planes at different depths are overlapped from the viewpoint of an observer. We evaluated how the fusion of the DFD visual illusion depended on the difference in distance between the front and rear images when the distance between the two images was changed. Subjective tests clarified the cases where DFD can be applied.

Supporting diversified rates for real-time communications will become possible and essential with the rapidly increasing transmission rates provided by the 4th generation (4G) mobile communication systems. In this paper, a novel wireless Quality of Service (QoS) scheme suitable for broadband CDMA packet cellular systems with adaptive modulation coding is proposed and its characteristics are described. The proposed QoS scheme comprises several control factors laid on the MAC and RRC layers, and can be harmonized with IP-QoS. Two important control factors are proposed: radio-condition-aware admission control and resource allocation reflected multistage scheduling. Computer simulations and testbed experiments indicate that by using the radio-condition-aware admission control, stable and guaranteed service can be provided to real-time users regardless of the interference and the variation in the location of the mobile station. Moreover, resource allocation reflected multistage scheduling maintains guaranteed rates for real-time users and provides high resource utilization efficiency for best-effort users. Consequently, by using the proposed wireless QoS scheme, it is possible to provide users with high quality and diversified real-time services, on a packet based radio network for enhanced 3G and beyond.

In this letter, we propose a partial minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) with successive interference cancellation (PMMSESIC) method in frequency domain to mitigate ICI caused by channel variation. Each detection, the proposed method detects the symbol with the largest received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all the undetected symbols, using an MMSE detector that considers only the interference of several neithborhood subcarriers. Analysis and simulations show that it outperforms the MMSE method at relatively high Eb/N0 and its performance is close to the MMSE with successive detection (MMSESD) method in relatively low Doppler frequency region.

In unidentifiable models, the Bayes estimation has the advantage of generalization performance over the maximum likelihood estimation. However, accurate approximation of the posterior distribution requires huge computational costs. In this paper, we consider an alternative approximation method, which we call a subspace Bayes approach. A subspace Bayes approach is an empirical Bayes approach where a part of the parameters are regarded as hyperparameters. Consequently, in some three-layer models, this approach requires much less computational costs than Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We show that, in three-layer linear neural networks, a subspace Bayes approach is asymptotically equivalent to a positive-part James-Stein type shrinkage estimation, and theoretically clarify its generalization error and training error. We also discuss the domination over the maximum likelihood estimation and the relation to the variational Bayes approach.

Cooperative transmission among users in multiple access wireless environments is an efficient way to obtain the powerful benefits of multi-antenna systems without the need for physical arrays. Its performance in relay networks were extensively analyzed but most papers only focused on the case of high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or loose power constraints. Based on the approximation of total SNR distributions of the propagation paths through relays as the exponential functions, we derive the analytical BER expression in a simple form for general relay networks under strict power restriction. Numerical and simulation results reveal the high accuracy of the distribution estimation as well as the high reliability of the deduced formula, especially at the low SNR.