In this paper, extended polar codes based on re-polarization technique are proposed. The presented schemes extend a conventional polar code of length N to length N+q, which stand in contrast to known length-compatible schemes such as puncturing and shortening techniques that reduce the length from N to N-q. For certain specific lengths, the waterfall region performance of our extended polar code is superior to that of other length-compatible polar codes. It provides better reliability and reduces the management overhead in several storage devices and communications systems. In essence, extended polar codes are created by re-polarizing the q least reliable nonfrozen bit-channels with the help of q additional frozen bit-channels. It is proved that this re-polarization enhances the reliability of these bits. Moreover, the extended schemes can be not only modified to improve decoding performance, but generalized as a m-stage scheme to improve throughput significantly. With parallel operation, the throughput is improved around 2m-1 times when q is small. Compared to a shortened polar code with length 1536, the encoding and decoding complexities of an extended polar code are only 50% and 60.5%, respectively.

In the 5G era, centralized mobility management raises the issue of traffic concentration on the mobility anchor. Distributed mobility management is expected to be a solution for this issue, as it moves mobility anchor functions to multiple edge routers. However, it incurs path stretch and redundant traffic on the backhaul links. Although these issues were not considered important in the 3G/4G era, they are expected to be a serious problem in the 5G era. In this paper, we design a routing-based mobility management mechanism to address the above problems. The mechanism integrates distributed routing with Bloom Filters and an anchor-less scheme where edge routers work as mobility anchors. Simulations show that the proposed mechanism achieves a good balance between redundant traffic on the backhaul links and routing overhead.

In order to support seamless mobility in the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Architecture we propose the Named-Node Network Architecture (3NA). 3NA introduces two independent namespaces to ICN, the 3N namespace used to uniquely identify nodes within a network and the Point of Attachment (PoA) namespace to identify a node's PoA to the network. The mappings between the two namespaces, along with all the necessary mechanisms to keep the mappings updated over time, are used when routing ICN packets to improve delay and the goodput when either the producer or the consumer are mobile. To support simultaneous producer and consumer mobility, we expand on the 3NA by adding a new Protocol Data Unit (PDU), the DU PDU. The DU PDU permits the encapsulation of ICN packets in a header that has source and destination name fields which belong to 3NA's 3N namespace. The new PDU permits seamless connectivity as long as 3NA's point of attachment signaling is strictly followed. We demonstrate the performance of the DU PDU against our previous defined communication methods and Named Data Networking's (NDN) Smart Flooding forwarding strategy using our open source nnnSIM module for the ns-3 framework. The new PDU outperforms all existing alternatives when the producer or both consumer and provider are mobile, obtaining overall lower mean network delay and higher median goodput.

A novel element is proposed for manipulating two orthogonally-polarized electromagnetic waves, resulting in a polarization-reconfigurable flat transmitarray. This element consists of four identical metallic patterns, including a square frame loaded with short stubs and an internal crossed dipole, which are printed on the two sides of three identical flat dielectric slabs, with no air gap among them. With a linearly-polarized (LP) feeder, the flat transmitarray can transform the LP incident wave into a circular, horizontal or vertical polarization wave in a convenient way. By rotating the LP feeder so that the polarization angle is 0°, 45°, 90° or 135°, the waves of linear horizontal, right-handed circular, linear vertical or left-handed circular polarization can be obtained alternately. Simulations and experiments are conducted to validate the performance. The measured axial ratio bandwidths for RHCP and LHCP transmitarrays are about 7.1% and 5.1%, respectively, the 3dB gain bandwidths are 16.19% and 22.4%, and the peak gains are 25.56dBi and 24.2dBi, respectively.

In order to tackle rapidly increasing traffic, dramatic performance enhancements in radio access technologies (RATs) are required for fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication system. In 5G, small/semi-macro cells using Massive MIMO (M-MIMO) with much wider bandwidth in higher frequency bands are overlaid on macro cell with existing frequency band. Moreover, high density deployment of small/semi-macro cell is expected to improve areal capacity. However, in low SHF band (below 6GHz), antenna array size of M-MIMO is large so that it cannot be installed on some environments. Therefore, to improve system throughput on various use cases in 5G, we have proposed distributed Massive MIMO (DM-MIMO). DM-MIMO coordinates lots of distributed transmission points (TPs) that are located in ultra-high density (UHD). Furthermore, DM-MIMO uses various numbers of antenna elements for each TP. In addition, DM-MIMO with UHD-TPs can create user-centric virtual cells corresponding to user mobility, and design of flexible antenna deployment for DM-MIMO is applicable to various use cases. Then, some key parameters such as the number of the distributed TPs, the number of antenna elements for each TP, and proper distance between TPs, should be determined. This paper presents such parameters for 5G DM-MIMO with flexible antenna deployment under fixed total transmission power and constant total number of antenna elements. Computer simulations show that DM-MIMO can achieve more than 1.9 times higher system throughput than an M-MIMO system using 128 antenna elements.

We newly propose the first lateral mode selective active multimode interferometer laser diode. The design principle is to arrange identical propagation path of different lateral mode. Thanks to multimode waveguide structure, 0th mode and 1st order mode has individual propagation path within one device. Individual lasing of fundamental mode as well as first mode was confirmed successfully.

In this paper, we present the roles played by millimeter-waves in the realization of an Internet of Things (IoT) society. Millimeter-waves are becoming essential frequency resources, enabling ultra-high-speed wireless networks supporting massive data traffic and high-resolution sensor devices. Multiple antenna technologies such as phased arrays, sector antennas, and MIMO signal processing are key technologies for putting these into practical use. In this paper, various examples of integration of multi-antenna systems are shown, as well as demonstration on 60GHz-band millimeter-wave wireless access and 79GHz-band high-resolution radar. We also propose applications to ITS for an IoT society, combining millimeter-wave wireless access and radar sensors, and discuss technical issues to be solved in the future.

This paper presents a SiC intelligent power module (IPM) which features low power loss. It is designed specifically for high performance low power motor drive applications including fans, refrigerator and air conditioner compressor drives, where energy efficiency is a major concern. The IPM utilizes 600 V planar-type SiC metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) as the power switching devices to deliver immensely low conduction and switching losses. Moreover, 600 V SiC schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) are adopted as the freewheeling diodes. In comparison with conventional silicon fast recovery diodes (FRDs), SiC SBDs exhibit practically no reverse recovery loss and can further diminish the power loss of the IPM. Besides, combined with these SiC power devices the proposed IPM is able to operate at a higher temperature up to 175°C while maintaining very low leakage current. Experimental results indicate that the power loss of the proposed IPM is between 2.2∼17 W at different compressor frequencies from 10 to 70 Hz, which can realize up to 32%∼53% improvement when compared to state-of-the-art conventional Si-based insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) IPM.

Protecting critical files in operating system is very important to system security. With the increasing adoption of Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI), designing VMI-based monitoring tools become a preferential choice with promising features, such as isolation, stealthiness and quick recovery from crash. However, these tools inevitably introduce high overhead due to their operation-based characteristic. Specifically, they need to intercept some file operations to monitor critical files once the operations are executed, regardless of whether the files are critical or not. It is known that file operation is high-frequency, so operation-based methods often result in performance degradation seriously. Thus, in this paper we present CFWatcher, a target-based real-time monitoring solution to protect critical files by leveraging VMI techniques. As a target-based scheme, CFWatcher constraints the monitoring into the operations that are accessing target files defined by users. Consequently, the overhead depends on the frequency of target files being accessed instead of the whole filesystem, which dramatically reduces the overhead. To validate our solution, a prototype system is built on Xen with full virtualization, which not only is able to monitor both Linux and Windows virtual machines, but also can take actions to prevent unauthorized access according to predefined policies. Through extensive evaluations, the experimental results demonstrate that the overhead introduced by CFWatcher is acceptable. Especially, the overhead is very low in the case of a few target files.

Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely applied in various fields. IoT data can also be put to cloud, but there are still concerns regarding security and privacy. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is attracted attention in cloud storage as a suitable encryption scheme for confidential data share and transmission. In CP-ABE, the secret key of a user is associated with a set of attributes; when attributes satisfy the access structure, the ciphertext is able to be decrypted. It is necessary that multiple authorities issue and manage secret keys independently. Authorities that generate the secret key can be regarded as managing the attributes of a user in CP-ABE. CP-ABE schemes that have multiple authorities have been proposed. The other hand, it should consider that a user's operation at the terminals is not necessary when a user drop an attribute and key is updated and the design of the communication system is a simple. In this paper, we propose CP-ABE scheme that have multiple key authorities and can revoke attribute immediately with no updating user's secret key for attribute revocation. In addition, the length of ciphertext is fixed. The proposed scheme is IND-CPA secure in DBDH assumption under the standard model. We compare the proposed scheme and the other CP-ABE schemes and show that the proposed scheme is more suitable for cloud storage.

The application of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) transmits data with road-to-vehicle communication (RVC) and inter-vehicle communication (IVC). Digital signature is essential to provide security for RVC and IVC. The public key certificate is used to verify that a public key belongs to an individual prover such as user or terminal. A certificate revocation list (CRL) is used for verifying validity of the public key certificate. A certificate authority (CA) publishes a CRL and distributes it to vehicles. CRL distribution traffic disturbs ITS application traffic because of sharing wireless channel between them. To distribute it on low bit rate will help to ease the disturbance. Although multiplex transmitting is effective in reliable communication, a duplication of received packets is waste of bandwidth as a consequence. This paper proposes a CRL distribution scheme based on random network coding which can reduce duplicate packets. The simulation results show that the number of duplicate packets of the proposed scheme is less than that of a simple error correction (EC)-based scheme and the proposed one can distribute CRL to more vehicles than EC-based ones.

We present a new simple Internet of Things (IoT) device that we call “Smart Bottle Cap”, which enables a standard bottle to become a user-controllable liquid pouring system. It consists of a mini vacuum pump to start the liquid flowing, a microcontroller to control the liquid flow, a BLE module to connect it to a smartphone, an accelerometer to detect the tilt angle of the bottle, an LED for drawing the attention of users, and a 3.7 V LiPo battery. The device's novel point is that a flow control mechanism built into a standard bottle cap makes the system suitable for general use and enables it to be easily extended.

Detection of cavities in X-ray astronomical images has become a field of interest, since the flourishing studies on black holes and the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). In this paper, an approach is proposed to detect cavities in X-ray astronomical images using our newly designed Granular Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN) based classifiers. The raw data are firstly preprocessed to obtain images of the observed objects, i.e., galaxies or galaxy clusters. In each image, pixels are classified into three categories, (1) the faint backgrounds (BKG), (2) the cavity regions (CAV), and (3) the bright central gas regions (CNT). And the sample sets are then generated by dividing large images into subimages with a window size according to the cavities' scale. Since the number of BKG samples are far more than the other types, to achieve balanced training sets, samples from the major class are split into subsets, i.e., granule. Then a group of three-convolutional-layer granular CNN networks without subsampling layers are designed as the classifiers, and trained with the labeled granular sample sets. Finally, the trained GCNN classifiers are applied to new observations, so as to estimate the cavity regions with a voting strategy and locate them with elliptical profiles on the raw observation images. Experiments and applications of our approach are demonstrated on 40 X-ray astronomical observations retrieved from chandra Data Archive (CDA). Comparisons among our approach, the β-model fitting and the Unsharp Masking (UM) methods were also performed, which prove our approach was more accurate and robust.

Given a graph G, a set of spanning trees of G are completely independent spanning trees (CISTs for short) if for any vertices x and y, the paths connecting them on these trees have neither vertex nor edge in common, except x and y. Hasunuma (2001, 2002) first introduced the concept of CISTs and conjectured that there are k CISTs in any 2k-connected graph. Later on, this conjecture was unfortunately disproved by Péterfalvi (2012). In this note, we show that Hasunuma's conjecture holds for graphs restricted in the class of 4-regular chordal rings CR(n,d), where both n and d are even integers.

This paper presents a low-latency, low-cost architecture for computing square and cube roots in the fixed-point format. The proposed architecture is designed based on a non-iterative root calculation scheme to achieve fast computations. While previous non-iterative root calculators are restricted to a square-root operation due to the limitation of their mathematical property, the root computation is generalized in this paper to apply an approximation method to the non-iterative scheme. On top of that, a recurrent method is proposed to select parameters, which enables us to reduce the table size while keeping the maximum relative error value low. Consequently, the proposed root calculator can support both square and cube roots at the expense of small delay and low area overheads. This extension can be generalized to compute the nth roots, where n is a positive integer.

In the era of e-commerce, purchase behavior prediction is one of the most important issues to promote both online companies' sales and the consumers' experience. The previous researches usually use traditional features based on the statistics and temporal dynamics of items. Those features lead to the loss of detailed items' information. In this study, we propose a novel kind of features based on temporally popular items to improve the prediction. Experiments on the real-world dataset have demonstrated the effectiveness and the efficiency of our proposed method. Features based on temporally popular items are compared with traditional features which are associated with statistics, temporal dynamics and collaborative filter of items. We find that temporally popular items are an effective and irreplaceable supplement of traditional features. Our study shed light on the effectiveness of the combination of popularity and temporal dynamics of items which can widely used for a variety of recommendations in e-commerce sites.

Systematic research on electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) in Japan started in 1977 by the establishment of a technical committee on “environmental electromagnetic engineering” named EMCJ, which was founded both in the Institute of Electronics and Communication Engineers or the present IEICE (Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers) and in the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan or the IEEJ. The research activities have been continued as the basic field of interdisciplinary study to harmonize even in the electromagnetic (EM) environment where radio waves provide intolerable EM disturbances to electronic equipment and to that environment itself. The subjects and their outcomes which the EMCJ has dealt with during about 40 years from the EMCJ establishment include the evaluation of EM environment, EMC of electric and electronic equipment, and EMC of biological effects involving bioelectromagnetics and so on. In this paper, the establishment history and structure of the EMCJ are reviewed along with the change in activities, and topics of the technical reports presented at EMCJ meetings from 2006 to 2016 are surveyed. In addition, internationalization and its related campaign are presented in conjunction with the EMCJ research activities, and the status quo of the EMCJ under the IEICE is also discussed along with the prospects.

In this letter, we present an improved method for the independence test procedure in the convolutional multicast algorithm proposed by Erez and Feder. We employ the linear independence test vectors to check the independence of the partial encoding vectors in the main program of Erez's convolutional multicast algorithm. It turns out that compared with the previous approach of computing the determinants of the correlative matrices, carrying out the independence test vectors can reduce the computational complexity.

Vocabulary acquisition based on the traditional pen-and-paper approach is outdated, and has been superseded by the multimedia-supported approach. In a multimedia-supported foreign language learning environment, a learning material comprised of a still-image, a text, and the corresponding sound data is considered to be the most effective way to memorize a noun. However, extraction of an appropriate still image for a noun has always been a challenging and time-consuming process for learners. Learners' burden would be reduced if a system could extract an appropriate image for representing a noun. Therefore, the present study purposed to extract an appropriate image for each noun in order to assist foreign language learners in acquisition of foreign vocabulary. This study presumed that, a learning material created with the help of an appropriate image would be more effective in recalling memory compared to the one created with an inappropriate image. As the first step to finding appropriate images for nouns, concrete nouns have been considered as the subject of investigation. Therefore, this study, at first proposed a definition of an appropriate image for a concrete noun. After that, an image re-ranking algorithm has been designed and implemented that is able to extract an appropriate image from a finite set of corresponding images for each concrete noun. Finally, immediate-after, short- and long-term learning effects of those images with regard to learners' memory retention rates have been examined by conducting immediate-after, delayed and extended delayed posttests. The experimental result revealed that participants in the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in their long-term memory retention, while no significant differences have been observed in immediate-after and in short-term memory retention. This result indicates that our algorithm could extract images that have a higher learning effect. Furthermore, this paper briefly discusses an on-demand learning system that has been developed to assist foreign language learners in creation of vocabulary learning materials.

As a result of large-scale and complicated of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), the technologies of operations and management of ICT infrastructure and systems are changing to adopt the variation and diversity of usage and communication characteristics. In retrospect, operations and management technologies cover widely from the support of telecommunications operations and remote monitoring for maintaining network equipments, to an integrated network management framework for configuration, monitoring, testing and controls. Recently, the spread of network virtualization technologies enable agility, integrity, and resilience to ICT services. Operations and management technologies will be more important in future, for the support of integrated management of ICT infrastructure including computing resource, and automation of service operations. In this paper, we review research activities of the Technical Committee on Information and Communications Management (ICM) with discussions of individual research category. We then describe the state-of-the-art topics and future directions in the area of ICM.