This paper describes the evaluation of the Voltage Down Converter (VDC) with low ratio of consuming current to load current in DC/AC operation mode. The stability, response and power consumption are investigated. First, for the stability and response, the VDC can operate in the condition that the bounce of the down voltage (dVDL) is no more than 10% of the setting voltage and the maximum load operation frequency (fmax) is 100 MHz at the average load current 70 mA (the maximum load current 140 mA). Secondly, for the power consumption, by using this VDC technology, the value of IC/IL can be suppressed to 5.1E-4 (IC: total consuming current in VDC, IL: average load current) in the condition that dVDL is no more than 10% of the setting voltage and fmax is 10 MHz at the average load current 70 mA. Thus, it is made clear that the VDC can realize high stability, good response and low power consumption at the same time. This technology is suitable for high performance ULSIs which require large load current and low-power consumption.

Error performance as well as ATM cell transfer characteristics in a new category of wireless access systems is discussed. Relocatable wireless access with neutral feature between the fixed and mobile systems can convey Mbit/s-order capacity with fairly high quality under line-of-sight propagation. It is an important question for such wireless access systems whether they are able to form a part of wired networks satisfying performance objectives specified in ITU-T Recommendations. This paper analyzes the characteristics of relocatable systems under Gamma-distribution fading environments, and clarifies quantitative relations between Bit Error Rate (BER), Severely Errored Second (SES), Errored Second (ES) and Cell Loss Ratio (CLR) in a calculation model employing QPSK and typical HEC (Header Error Control). Thus it is demonstrated for the first time that in most cases the dominant parameter is the SES objective. Also it will be possible for a relocatable system with appropriate fade margin to meet the ITU-T performance specifications.

Access control is a key technology for providing data security in database management systems (DBMSs). Recently, various authorization models for object-oriented databases (OODBs) have been proposed since authorization models for relational databases are insufficient for OODBs because of the characteristics of OODBs, such as class hierarchies, inheritance, and encapsulation. Generally, an authorization is modeled as a set of rights, where a right consists of at least three components s, o, t and means that subject s is authorized to perform operation t on object o. In specifying authorizations implicitly, inference rules are useful for deriving rights along the class hierarchies on subjects, objects, and operations. An access request req=(s,o,t) is permitted if a right corresponding to req is given explicitly or implicitly. In this paper, we define an authorization model independent of any specific database schemas and authorization policies, and also define an authorization specification language which is powerful enough to specify authorization policies proposed in the literature. Furthermore, we propose an efficient access control method for an authorization specified by the proposed language, and evaluate the proposed method by simulation.

The purpose of this letter is to investigate the stability conditions of the active two port networks having some restrictions on load and source terminations, and then they have been obtained. Next, these results and the previous stability coditions are investigated, and then the new combined stability condition are proposed.

Parallel Transaction Processing (TP) systems have great potential to serve the ever-increasing demands for high transaction processing rate. This potential, however, may not be reached due to the data contention and the widely-used two-phase locking (2PL) Concurrency Control (CC) method. In this paper, a distributed locking-based CC policy called LWDC (Local Wait-Depth Control) was proposed for dealing with this problem for the shared-nothing parallel TP system. On the basis of the LWDC policy, an algorithm called LWDCk was designed. Using simulation LWDCk was compared with the 2PL and the base-line Distributed Wait-Depth Limited (DWDL) CC methods. Simulation studies show that the new algorithm offers better system performance than those compared.

The switch-block architecture of FPGAs is discussed to see a good balance between programmable-switch resources and routability. For the purpose, FPGAs are assumed to have certain extremal structures, whose switch-blocks consist of parallel or complete switch-sets where a switch-set is a set of switches between two sides of the switch-block. A polynomial time detailed-routing algorithm for a given global-routing is presented if the switch-block consists of two or less parallel switch-sets or three that form a cycle. For other FPGAs, the corresponding decision problem is proved to be -complete. A best compromise between switch resources and routability is offered.

In the future, more and more network providers will be established through the introduction of an open telecommunications market. At this time, it is necessary to guarantee the fair competition between these network providers. In this paper, a negotiation protocol for connection establishment is proposed. This negotiation protocol is based on the concept of open, competitive bidding and can guarantee fair competition between the network providers. In this negotiation protocol, each network providers objective is to maximize its profit. Conversely, each users objective is to select a network provider which will supply as much capacity as required. Employing this negotiation protocol, the users and the network providers can select each other based on their objectives. In this paper, adaptation strategies which network providers and users can adopt under the proposed negotiation protocol framework are also discussed. A network provider which adopts this strategy can obtain enough profit even when the number of connection requests is small relative to the idle bandwidth capacity. Moreover, a user who adopts this strategy can be sure to obtain bandwidth even when the idle bandwidth capacity is small relative to the number of connection requests.

Multi-recast techniques make it possible for a voter to participate in a sequence of different designated votings by using only one ticket. In a multi-recastable ticket scheme for electronic voting, every voter of a group can obtain an m-castable ticket (m-ticket), and through the m-ticket, the voter can participate in a sequence of m different designated votings held in this group. The m-ticket contains all possible intentions of the voter in the sequence of votings, and in each of the m votings, a voter casts his vote by just making appropriate modifications to his m-ticket. The authority cannot produce both the opposite version of a vote cast by a voter in one voting and the succeeding uncast votes of the voter. Only one round of registration action is required for a voter to request an m-ticket from the authority. Moreover, the size of such an m-ticket is not larger than that of an ordinary vote. It turns out that the proposed scheme greatly reduces the network traffic between the voters and the authority during the registration stages in a sequence of different votings, for example, the proposed method reduces the communication traffic by almost 80% for a sequence of 5 votings and by nearly 90% for a sequence of 10 votings.

In recent years, the rapid advancements of wireless communication technology and computer down-sizing technology have enabled users to utilize computing resources anywhere in the computer network. New applications constructed on the mobile database system are becoming popular. However, the current database systems do not provide special facilities for specific update operations in a mobile computing environment. Moreover, due to the lack of a common data handling method and a mutual communication mechanism, varieties in implementations may cause applications to be incompatible with each other. In this paper, we take up the issue of data handling, in a mobile computing environment, and propose an active mobile database system (AMDS) to solve this issue. First, we review the difficulties of dynamic update of databases in a mobile computing environment, and provide a basic concept of AMDS as a solution for these difficulties. In order to construct an AMDS, we focus on asynchronous events such as the appearance and disappearance of a mobile computer in a wireless communication cell. Then we provide a facility to specify the behavior of each system in Event-Condition-Action(ECA) rules in the same way as normal active database systems. Moreover, we show the architecture and the design of our implementation of AMDS. And, finally AMDS can be easily implemented as a common database infrastructure and work well on heterogeneous systems through indoor experiments.

Silva et al. has suggested a criterion based on incidence matrix to verify if a given extended free choice net has a live and bounded marking. This paper shows that this criterion is a necessary and sufficient condition that a given net is a state machine allocatable (SMA) net. This result gives a polynomial algorithm to verify SMA net.

We investigate the relaxation oscillation characteristics of an actively mode-locked fiber laser and a novel stabilizing method of the laser theoretically and experimentally. The stabilizing method controls cavity length to suppress the rf power of the relaxation oscillation frequency of the laser output, and can directly monitor the stability of the laser to ensure the most stable operation. With this method, the rf power ratio between mode-locking frequency and the background noise can be kept to more than 70 dB, and highly stable transform-limited pulse generation is achieved. Bit-error-free operation at 6. 3 GHz over 10 hours is successfully demonstrated. The stability of the center wavelength of the laser output and the required accuracy of cavity control for high-speed laser operation are also discussed.

We consider statistical multiplexing for various types of input data with different statistics in an integrated multimedia system such as ATM networks. The system is assumed to have a constant service rate and a finite buffer. The bit-rate of each data input is variable and is modeled by a fractional Brownian motion process. Under a criterion of quality of service, we obtain an acceptable region of statistical multiplexing. We introduce a new method of investigating the acceptable region of a statistical multiplexer. The results show that transmitting multitype input processes will increase the multiplexing gain.

When a set of objects is shared among several applications, multiple implementations for the set are required in order to suit each application as much as possible. Furthermore, if a set of objects could have multiple implementations, the following issues arise: (1) how to select the best implementation when processing queries on the set, and (2) how to propagate updates on an implementation of the set to the others. In this paper we propose a mechanism of multiple implementations for a set, and also give a solution for the latter issue. In the proposal a set can be of multiple types, and each of the types corresponds to an implementation already contained within the set. Update propagation can be achieved by a rewriting technique at compilation time. We also present a performance study in which the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal were examined.

Mobile databases will play an important role in mobile computing environment, to provide data storing and data retrieval functionalities which are needed by most applications. In mobile computing environment, the wireless communication poses some problems, which require us to minimize its use. Replication is a database technique that is commonly used to fulfill the requirement in minimizing network usage. In this paper, we propose two replica allocation strategies, called primary-copy tracking replica allocation (PTRA) and user majority replica allocation (UMRA), which are better suited to the mobile computing environment. Their proposals are intended to cope with cost performance issues in data replication due to user mobility in mobile computing environment. To investigate their effectiveness, we provide access cost analysis and comparison on these strategies and the static replica allocation (SRA) strategy. We show that our proposed strategies outperform the SRA strategy when user mobility (inter-cell movement) is relatively low as compared with data access rate.

In this paper, we present an analytic model to study the reliability of some important disk array organizations that have been proposed by others in the literature. These organizations are based on the combination of two options for the data layout, regular RAID-5 and block designs, and three alternatives for sparing, hot sparing, distributed sparing and parity sparing. Uncorrectable bit errors have big effects on reliability but are ignored in traditional reliability analysis of disk arrays. We consider both disk failures and uncorrectable bit errors in the model. The reliability of disk arrays is measured in terms of MTTDL (Mean Time To Data Loss). A unified formula of MTTDL has been derived for these disk array organizations. The MTTDLs of these disk array organizations are also compared using the analytic model. By numerical experiments, we show that the data losses caused by uncorrectable bit errors may dominate the data losses of disk array systems though only the data losses caused by disk failures are traditionally considered. The consideration of uncorrectable bit errors provides a more realistic look at the reliability of the disk array systems.

We present a new scheduling policy named Value-based Processor Allocation (VPA-k) for scheduling value-based transactions in a multiprocessor real-time database system. The value of a transaction represents the profit the transaction contributes to the system if it is completed before its deadline. Using VPA-k policy, the transactions with higher values are given higher priorities to execute first, while at most k percentage of the total processors are allocated to the urgent transactions dynamically. Through simulation experiments, VPA-k policy is shown to outperform other scheduling policies substantially in both maximizing the totally obtained values and minimizing the number of missed transactions.

An adaptive stability-growth (ASG) learning algorithm is proposed for improving, as much as possible, the stability of a Hopfield-type associative memory. While the ASG algorithm can be used to determine the optimal stability instead of the well-known minimum-overlap (MO) learning algorithm with sufficiently large lower bound for MO value, it converges much more quickly than the MO algorithm in real implementation. Therefore, the proposed ASG algorithm is more suitable than the MO algorithm for real-world design of an optimal Hopfield-type associative memory.

In this paper, we analyze overload and stability in the charge-pump phase locked loop (PLL). We propose a new computational model that can be applied for the precise estimation of the physical limits of charge-pump, the leakage current of loop filter and waveform distortion of charge-pump PLL operating in high speed. We derive the exact mathematical expressions of the parameters describing the steady-state behavior of the PLL as well as the transient-state behavior. Performance comparisons with the conventional model are provided through numerical results. Algorithms for approximate analysis is also provided. The new model is particularity useful for analyzing the cases that the charge-pump PLL operates in high- speed or the loop filter has large leakage current.

From the standpoint of reducing the electromagnetic (EM) absorption in the human head for portable telephones, a ferrite sheet is proposed to use as a protection attachment between the antenna and the head. By using an anatomically based head model and a realistic portable telephone model, the effects of the ferrite sheet on both the reduction of EM absorption and antenna radiation pattern are numerically analyzed by the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The results show that a ferrite sheet can result in a reduction over 13% for the spatial peak SAR averaged over one gram of tissue relative to a degradation below 0.6 dB for the antenna radiation pattern.

In supervisory control, discrete event dynamic systems (DEDSs) are modeled by finite-state automata, and their behaviors described by the associated formal languages; control is exercised by a supervisor, whose control action is to enable or disable the controllable events. In this paper we present a general stability concept for DEDSs, stability in the sense of Lyapunov with resiliency, by incorporating Lyapunov stability concepts with the concept of stability in the sense of error recovery. We also provide algorithms for verifying stability and obtaining a domain of attraction. Relations between the notion of stability and the notion of fault-tolerance are addressed.