Coherence resonance in propagating spikes generated by noise in spatially distributed excitable media is studied with computer simulation and circuit experiment on the FitzHugh-Nagumo model. White noise is added to the one end of the media to generate spikes, which propagate to the other end. The mean and standard deviation of the interspike intervals of the spikes after propagation take minimum values at the intermediate strength of the added noise. This shows stronger coherence than obtained in the previous studies.

Method invocation mechanism is one of the essential features in object-oriented programming languages. This mechanism contributes to data encapsulation and code reuse, but there is a risk of runtime type errors. In the case of object-oriented databases (OODBs), a runtime error causes rollback. Therefore, it is desirable to ensure that a given OODB schema is consistent, i.e., no runtime error occurs during the execution of queries under any database instance of the OODB schema. This paper discusses the computational complexity of the type-consistency problem. As a model of OODB schemas, we adopt update schemas introduced by Hull et al., which have all of the basic features of OODBs such as class hierarchy, inheritance, complex objects, and so on. The type-consistency problem for update schemas is known to be undecidable. We introduce a subclass of update schemas, called acyclic schemas, and show that the type-consistency problem for acyclic schemas is in coNEXPTIME. Furthermore, we show that the problem for recursion-free acyclic schemas is coNEXPTIME-hard and the problem for retrieval acyclic schemas is PSPACE-complete.

In this paper, we consider the net assignment problem in the logic emulation system. This problem is also known as the board-level-routing problem. There are field programmable logic arrays (FPGAs) and crossbars on an emulator board. Each FPGA is connected to each crossbar. Connection requests between FPGAs are called nets, and FPGAs are interconnected through crossbars. We are required to assign each net to the suitable crossbar. This problem is known to be NP-complete in general. A polynomial time algorithm is known for a certain restricted case, in which we treat only 2-terminal nets. In this paper we propose a new polynomial time algorithm for this case.

We proposed and demonstrated a novel wavelength stabilization technique for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems using dithering-induced AM cancellation which improves both wavelength stability and data transmission performance. Our wavelength stabilization technique consists of an optical frequency discriminating function and a function for canceling AM components induced by frequency dithering of the light source. The frequency discrimination in this technique is based on an FM-AM conversion effect, obtained by interaction from frequency dithering of the light with the bandpass characteristic of an arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) multiplexer. The AM cancellation function was added to suppress optical frequency discriminating errors occurring due to AM components induced by frequency dithering in this wavelength stabilization architecture. In this scheme, an electro-absorption (EA) modulator is employed not only for modulating high-speed data traffic but also for suppressing AM components induced by frequency dithering on the light signal. Since the EA modulator is usually used for modulating high-speed data traffic, dedicated optical devices are not required for suppressing the AM components. The wavelength stability of a light source can therefore be enhanced with simple architecture. In the demonstration, a reduction of fluctuations within 50 MHz versus changes in the modulation index, and long-term stability within 320 MHz after more than 60 hours was achieved in 10 Gbit/s NRZ transmission. We also confirmed that the proposed AM cancellation technique effectively reduces the transmission penalties due to frequency dithering in 10 Gbit/s NRZ data transmission performance.

We proposed and demonstrated a novel wavelength stabilization technique for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems using dithering-induced AM cancellation which improves both wavelength stability and data transmission performance. Our wavelength stabilization technique consists of an optical frequency discriminating function and a function for canceling AM components induced by frequency dithering of the light source. The frequency discrimination in this technique is based on an FM-AM conversion effect, obtained by interaction from frequency dithering of the light with the bandpass characteristic of an arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) multiplexer. The AM cancellation function was added to suppress optical frequency discriminating errors occurring due to AM components induced by frequency dithering in this wavelength stabilization architecture. In this scheme, an electro-absorption (EA) modulator is employed not only for modulating high-speed data traffic but also for suppressing AM components induced by frequency dithering on the light signal. Since the EA modulator is usually used for modulating high-speed data traffic, dedicated optical devices are not required for suppressing the AM components. The wavelength stability of a light source can therefore be enhanced with simple architecture. In the demonstration, a reduction of fluctuations within 50 MHz versus changes in the modulation index, and long-term stability within 320 MHz after more than 60 hours was achieved in 10 Gbit/s NRZ transmission. We also confirmed that the proposed AM cancellation technique effectively reduces the transmission penalties due to frequency dithering in 10 Gbit/s NRZ data transmission performance.

In this paper, we propose a new location tracking method for pointer forwarding with distributed HLRs schemes to decrease the location tracking cost. Similar to the distributed HLR schemes, the location information is replicated on all HLRs in our scheme. However, unlike the traditional distributed HLR schemes, we propagate the most recent location changes from an HLR to reset the forwarding pointers in other HLRs, and thus reduce the cost of location tracking for call deliveries. The signaling cost of location propagation may be too costly to be practical. Therefore, we allow some inconsistency to exist among the location data of HLRs and defer the propagation of location changes to reduce the propagation cost. Three delay propagation policies are also proposed and analyzed using simulation. The performance result shows that the delay propagation policies reduce the propagation cost and the propagation resetting process degrades the location tracking cost. Our method preserves a low total cost for call deliveries, registrations and propagations in distributed HLRs.

Optimization procedure on higher order Delta-sigma (ΔΣ) modulator coefficients is proposed. The procedure is based on the higher order ΔΣ modulator stability judgement method. The application specification can be satisfied with the proposed method. The 4th order modulator examples are illustrated. Optimized coefficients and its behavior model simulation results demonstrated that this methodology is suitable for the design of higher order ΔΣ AD converter. The coefficients tolerance up to 2% is allowed for switched-capacitor implementation, with not more than 3.5 dB SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) degradation. The optimized coefficients improves 2 to 3 bit of the modulator's resolution than the previous proposed algorithm, and remains the stable input limit satisfies the original design requirement.

With the advancement of technologies in wireless communication and computer down-sizing, it becomes possible to access a global network using handy terminals which are equipped with wireless communication facilities. In such a mobile computing environment, data management is one of the primary objectives of effective computer uses. However, since conventional distributed data management technologies assume that servers and clients are fixed at certain locations in a network, they do not provide any tools to construct advanced applications which make full use of dynamically changing information in such an environment. In this paper, in order to incorporate data distributed over mobile computing environment, we propose a dynamic data integration mechanism called MobiView which is an enhanced view mechanism of a conventional database system. In MobiView, we introduce four methods for database indication without using conventional host name or its local name: host-specified, cell-specified, location-dependent, and MobiView-oriented, through which we discuss how to handle both mobile database servers and mobile database clients.

This paper presents a new performance and routability-driven routing algorithm for symmetrical array-based field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The contribution of our work is to overcome one of the most critical limitations of the previous routing algorithms: inaccurate estimations of routing density which were too general for symmetrical FPGA. To this end, we devised new routing density measures that are directly linked to the structure (switch block) of symmetrical FPGA, and utilize them consistently in global and detailed routings. With the use of the proposed accurate routing metrics, we developed a new routing algorithm called a reliable net decomposition-based routing which is very fast, and yet produces excellent routing results in terms of net/path delays and routability. An extensive experiment was carried out to show the effectiveness of our algorithm based on the proposed cost metrics. In summary, when compared to the best known results in the literature (TRACER-fpga_PR and SEGA), our algorithm has shown 31.9% shorter longest path delay and 23.0% shorter longest net delay even with about 9 times faster execution time.

We consider a dynamically reconfigureable network where dynamically changing traffic is offered. Rearrangement and adjustment of network capacity can be performed to maintain Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for different traffic classes in the dynamic traffic environment. In this work, we consider the case of a single, dynamic traffic class scenario in a loss mode environment. We have developed a numerical, analytical tool which models the dynamically changing network traffic environment using a time-varying, fluid-flow, differential equation; of which we can use to study the impact of adaptive capacity adjustment control schemes. We present several capacity adjustment control schemes including schemes which use blocking and system utilization as means to calculate when and how much adjustment should be made. Through numerical studies, we show that a purely blocking-based capacity adjustment control scheme with a preset adjustment value can be very sensitive to capacity changes and can lead to network instability. We also show that schemes, that uses system utilization as a means to calculate the amount of capacity adjustment needed, is consistently stable for the load scenarios considered. Finally, we introduce a minimum time interval threshold between adjustments, which can avoid network instability, in the cases where the results showed that capacity adjustment had been performed too often.

The head tissue heterogeneity required in the spatial peak specific absorption rate (SAR) assessment for portable telephones was investigated by using the FDTD method in conjunction with an MRI-based human head model. The tissue heterogeneity of the head model was changed from one type of tissue to 17 types of tissue. The results showed that, at 900 MHz and 2 GHz, the homogeneous modeling results in an underestimate about 20% for the λ/2 monopole antenna portable telephones and an overestimate to the same extent for the λ/4 monopole or helical antenna portable telephones. A head model with a simple skin-fat-muscle-bone-brain structure seems to be sufficient to obtain a fairly accurate one-gram or ten-gram averaged spatial peak SAR value in computational dosimetry for portable telephone compliance.

We present a new method for discovering knowledge from structured data which are represented by graphs in the framework of Inductive Logic Programming. A graph, or network, is widely used for representing relations between various data and expressing a small and easily understandable hypothesis. The analyzing system directly manipulating graphs is useful for knowledge discovery. Our method uses Formal Graph System (FGS) as a knowledge representation language for graph structured data. FGS is a kind of logic programming system which directly deals with graphs just like first order terms. And our method employs a refutably inductive inference algorithm as a learning algorithm. A refutably inductive inference algorithm is a special type of inductive inference algorithm with refutability of hypothesis spaces, and is suitable for knowledge discovery. We give a sufficiently large hypothesis space, the set of weakly reducing FGS programs. And we show that this hypothesis space is refutably inferable from complete data. We have designed and implemented a prototype of a knowledge discovery system KD-FGS, which is based on our method and acquires knowledge directly from graph structured data. Finally we discuss the applicability of our method for graph structured data with experimental results on some graph theoretical notions.

In recent years, more emphasis is placed on the performance of massive databases. It is often required not only that database systems provide high throughputs with rapid response times, but also that they are fully available 24-hours-per-day and 7-days-per-week. Requirements for throughput and response time can be satisfied by upgrading the hardware. As a result, databases in the old hardware environment have to be moved to the new one. Moving a database, however, generally requires taking the database off line for a long time, which is unacceptable for numerous applications. In this paper, a very practical and important subject is addressed: how to upgrade the hardware on line, i.e., how to move a database from an old hardware environment to a new one concurrently with users' reading and writing of the database. A technique for this purpose is proposed. We have implemented a prototype based on this technique. Our experiments with the prototype shown that compared with conventional off-line approach, the proposed technique could give a performance improvement by more than 85% in the query-bound environment and 40% in the update-bound environment.

In this paper we propose a subsequence matching algorithm that supports moving average transform of arbitrary order in time-series databases. Moving average transform reduces the effect of noise and has been used in many areas such as econometrics since it is useful in finding the overall trends. The proposed algorithm extends the existing subsequence matching algorithm proposed by Faloutsos et al. (SUB94 in short). If we applied the algorithm without any extension, we would have to generate an index for each moving average order and would have serious storage and CPU time overhead. In this paper we tackle the problem using the notion of index interpolation. Index interpolation is defined as a searching method that uses one or more indexes generated for a few selected cases and performs searching for all the cases satisfying some criteria. The proposed algorithm, which is based on index interpolation, can use only one index for a pre-selected moving average order k and performs subsequence matching for arbitrary order m ( k). We prove that the proposed algorithm causes no false dismissal. The proposed algorithm can also use more than one index to improve search performance. The algorithm works better with smaller selectivities. For selectivities less than 10-2, the degradation of search performance compared with the fully-indexed case--which is equivalent to SUB94--is no more than 33.0% when one index is used, and 17.2% when two indexes are used. Since the queries with smaller selectivities are much more frequent in general database applications, the proposed algorithm is suitable for practical situations.

This paper presents the design and simulation of a power efficient 1:4 interpolation FIR filter with partitioned look Up Table (LUT) structure. Using the symmetry of the filter coefficients and the contents of the LUT, the area of the proposed filter is minimized. The two filters share the partitioned LUT and activate the LUT selectively to realize the low power operation. Experimental results suggest that the proposed filter reduces the power consumption by 25% and simultaneously reduces the gate area by 7% compared to the previously proposed single-architecture dual-channel filter.

The use of the column-rank of the system sensitivity matrix as a testability measure for parametric faults in linear analog circuits was pioneered by Sen and Saeks in 1970s, and later re-introduced by several others. Its practical use has been limited by how it can be calculated. Numerical algorithms suffer from inevitable round-off errors, while traditional symbolic techniques can only handle very small circuits. In this paper, an efficient method is introduced for the analysis of Sen and Saeks' analog testability. The method employs determinant decision diagram based symbolic circuit analysis. Experimental results have demonstrated the new method is capable of handling much larger analog circuits.

This paper proposes aspiration controls which restrains aspiration branches and keeps the original tabu-based searching by considering past and/or (predicted) future searching profiles. For implementation of the aspiration control we employ not only the short-term and long-term memory but also future memory which is first introduced in this paper as a new concept in the tabu search field. The tabu search with the aspiration control is also parallelized. Moreover two types of parallel cooperative searching scheme are proposed. Through computational experiment, we observe efficiency of our approach comparing to the traditional ones. Especially, we find that cooperative searching has possibility to improve the solution quality very well.

A distributed system is said to be self-stabilizing if it converges to some legitimate state from an arbitrary state in a finite number of steps. The number of steps required for convergence is usually referred to as the stabilization time, and its reduction is one of the main performance issues in the design of self-stabilizing systems. In this paper, we propose an automated method for computing the stabilization time. The method uses Boolean functions to represent the state space in order to assuage the state explosion problem, and computes the stabilization time by manipulating the Boolean functions. To demonstrate the usefulness of the method, we apply it to the analysis of existing self-stabilizing algorithms. The results show that the method can perform stabilization time analysis very fast, even when an underlying state space is very huge.

This paper proposes the binary second-order recurrent neural networks (BSRNN) equivalent to the modified finite automata (MFA) and presents the learning algorithm to construct the stable BSRNN for inferring regular grammar. This network combines two trends; one is to transform strings of a regular grammar into a recurrent neural network through training with no restriction of the number of neurons, the number of strings, and the length of string and the other is to directly transform itself into a finite automaton. Since neurons in the BSRNN employ a hard-limiter activation functions, the proposed BSRNN can become a good alternative of hardware implementation for regular grammars and finite automata as well as grammatical inference.

We generalize the construction of quantum error-correcting codes from F4-linear codes by Calderbank et al. to pm-state systems. Then we show how to determine the error from a syndrome. Finally we discuss a systematic construction of quantum codes with efficient decoding algorithms.