Directional communications have been considered as a feasible alternative to improve spatial division and throughput in mobile communication environments. In general, directional MAC protocols proposed in the literature rely on channel reservation based on control frames, such as RTS/CTS. Notwithstanding, channel reservation based on control frames increases latency and has an impact on the network throughput. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a channel reservation technique based on pulse/tone signals. The proposed scheme, termed directional pulse/tone channel reservation (DPTCR), allows for efficient channel reservation without resorting to control frames such as RTS and CTS. Theoretical and empirical results show that the proposed scheme has a low probability of failure while providing significant throughput gains. The results show that DPTCR is able to provide throughput improvement up to 158% higher as compared to traditional channel reservation employing RTS/CTS frames.

The iterative random subdivision of rectangles is used as a generation model of networks in physics, computer science, and urban planning. However, these researches were independent. We consider some relations in them, and derive fundamental properties for the average lifetime depending on birth-time and the balanced distribution of rectangle faces.

Local governments usually designed disaster response plan by themselves in order to overcome disasters. In previous research, we developed the effective analysis method for disaster response which is “BFD (Business Flow Diagram)”. In this research, in order to improve effect of BFD analysis, we designed and developed WBS Manager focusing on the process of WBS development which is a part of BFD analysis, because WBS development is fundamental process of BFD method. Especially we developed WBS Manager as web-based application, and implemented it to actual studies at local governments in planning their disaster response operations. In this paper, we introduced the overview of WBS Manager.

Many previous studies on image quality assessment of 3D still images or video clips have been conducted. In particular, it is important to know the region in which assessors are interested or on which they focus in images or video clips, as represented by the ROI (Region of Interest). For multi-view 3D images, it is obvious that there are a number of viewpoints; however, it is not clear whether assessors focus on objects or background regions. It is also not clear on what assessors focus depending on whether the background region is colored or gray scale. Furthermore, while case studies on coded degradation in 2D or binocular stereoscopic videos have been conducted, no such case studies on multi-view 3D videos exist, and therefore, no results are available for coded degradation according to the object or background region in multi-view 3D images. In addition, in the case where the background region is gray scale or not, it was not revealed that there were affection for gaze point environment of assessors and subjective image quality. In this study, we conducted experiments on the subjective evaluation of the assessor in the case of coded degradation by JPEG coding of the background or object or both in 3D CG images using an eight viewpoint parallax barrier method. Then, we analyzed the results statistically and classified the evaluation scores using an SVM.

In this letter, a simple dispersion matrix design method for generalized space-time shift keying is presented, in which the dispersion matrices are systematically constructed with cyclic identity matrix, without the need of computer search. The proposed scheme is suitable for any number of transmit antennas greater than two, and can achieve the transmit diversity order of two except two special cases. Simulation results are presented to verify our theoretical analysis and the performance of the proposed scheme.

This letter presents performance analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region for matched filter (MF) precoding in single cell Massive MIMO systems. The outage probability function is derived in closed form, and the data rate of each user is also given. We have also presented asymptotic analysis in terms of data rate for MF when the number of users and the number of antennas grow without bounds. The expressions of these analytical results are rather simple and are thus convenient for overall performance evaluation. The simulation results show that the analysis are very accurate.

Information Centric Networking (ICN) had merits in terms of mobility, security, power consumption and network traffic. When a large-scale disaster occurred, the current communication system might be fragile and the server based network service might be unavailable due to the damages, network congestions, and power failure, etc. In this paper, we proposed an ICN based Disaster Information Sharing Service (DISS) [1], [2] system. DISS could provide robust information sharing service. Users could publish disaster information as a content message with the help of our DISS. In addition, by utilizing DISS's message naming strategy, users could retrieve disaster information even without a server connection. The ICN based DISS could reduce the probability of network congestion when a large number of simultaneous connections occurring. It could provide server-less service in poor network condition. DISS allows users retrieve disaster information from terminals or ICN nodes. During disasters, sharing information timely and effective could protect people from disaster, ensure people's safety.

This paper presents an automatic method to track soccer players in soccer video recorded from a single camera where the occurrence of pan-tilt-zoom can take place. The automatic object tracking is intended to support texture extraction in a free viewpoint video authoring application for soccer video. To ensure that the identity of the tracked object can be correctly obtained, background segmentation is performed and automatically removes commercial billboards whenever it overlaps with the soccer player. Next, object tracking is performed by an attribute matching algorithm for all objects in the temporal domain to find and maintain the correlation of the detected objects. The attribute matching process finds the best match between two objects in different frames according to their pre-determined attributes: position, size, dominant color and motion information. Utilizing these attributes, the experimental results show that the tracking process can handle occlusion problems such as occlusion involving more than three objects and occluded objects with similar color and moving direction, as well as correctly identify objects in the presence of camera movements.

A millimeter-wave radar receiver using a z-cut LiNbO3 optical modulator with orthogonal-gap-embedded patch-antennas on a low-k dielectric material is proposed. A millimeter-wave from a reflected radar signal can be received by the patch-antennas and converted directly to a lightwave through electro-optic modulation. A low-k dielectric material is used as a substrate for improving antenna gain. Additionally, an interaction length between millimeter-wave and lightwave electric fields becomes long. As a result, large modulation efficiency can be obtained, which is proportional to sensitivity of the millimeter-wave radar receiver. Optical millimeter-wave radar beam-forming can be obtained using the proposed device with meandering-gaps for controlling interaction between millimeter-wave and lightwave electric fields in electro-optic modulation. Analysis and experimentally demonstration of the proposed device are discussed and reported for 40GHz millimeter-wave bands. Optical millimeter-wave radar beam-forming in 2-D is also discussed.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) utilizing the power domain and advanced receiver has been considered as one promising multiple access technology for further cellular enhancements toward the 5th generation (5G) mobile communications system. Most of the existing investigations into NOMA focus on the combination of NOMA with orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) for either downlink or uplink. In this paper, we investigate NOMA for uplink with single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) being used. Differently from OFDMA, SC-FDMA requires consecutive resource allocation to a user equipment (UE) in order to achieve low peak to average power ratio (PAPR) transmission by the UE. Therefore, sophisticated designs of scheduling algorithm for NOMA with SC-FDMA are needed. To this end, this paper investigates the key issues of uplink NOMA scheduling such as UE grouping method and resource widening strategy. Because the optimal schemes have high computational complexity, novel schemes with low computational complexity are proposed for practical usage for uplink resource allocation of NOMA with SC-FDMA. On the basis of the proposed scheduling schemes, the performance of NOMA is investigated by system-level simulations in order to provide insights into the suitability of using NOMA for uplink radio access. Key issues impacting NOMA performance are evaluated and analyzed, such as scheduling granularity, UE number and the combination with fractional frequency reuse (FFR). Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and show that NOMA is a promising radio access technology for 5G systems.

Selective visual attention is an integral mechanism of the human visual system that is often neglected when designing perceptually relevant image and video quality metrics. Disregarding attention mechanisms assumes that all distortions in the visual content impact equally on the overall quality perception, which is typically not the case. Over the past years we have performed several experiments to study the effect of visual attention on quality perception. In addition to gaining a deeper scientific understanding of this matter, we were also able to use this knowledge to further improve various quality prediction models. In this article, I review our work with the aim to increase awareness on the importance of visual attention mechanisms for the effective design of quality prediction models.

A re-configurable wavelength de-multiplexer for wave-length-division-multiplexed (WDM) radio-over-fiber (RoF) systems, which is specially designed for delivering frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FM-CW) signals, is newly developed. The principle and characteristics of the developed de-multiplexer are described in detail. Then the de-multiplexing performances of 4-channel WDM 32-GHz-band, 8-channel WDM 48-GHz-band, and 5-channel WDM 96-GHz-band FM-CW RoF signals are evaluated with the de-multiplexer.

The complexity of the graph isomorphism problem for trapezoid graphs has been open over a decade. This paper shows that the problem is GI-complete. More precisely, we show that the graph isomorphism problem is GI-complete for comparability graphs of partially ordered sets with interval dimension 2 and height 3. In contrast, the problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time for comparability graphs of partially ordered sets with interval dimension at most 2 and height at most 2.

Terahertz (THz) band is an attractive candidate for future broadband (> 10 Gb/s) wireless backhaul and fronthaul. THz transmitter employing optical frequency comb can provide high quality THz carrier, and is useful to the future broadband THz communication systems based on coherent transmission technique. To realize coherent transmission, high quality carrier generation is essential and it is important to evaluate the signal quality of a THz transmitter. In this paper, we derive error vector magnitude (EVM) including optical impairments (optical amplifier noise, laser phase noise, optical crosstalk and IQ imbalance of optical modulator) of the optical frequency comb based transmitter. The calculated EVM is in good agreement with simulated one, and practical requirements for optical impairment are indicated. The analysis will be useful in the design of THz transmission systems employing an optical frequency comb.

In this paper, we propose a flexible and high-capacity front-haul link for the uplink transmission of high-speed mobile signals using a cascade of radio-on-radio (RoR) and radio-over-fiber (RoF) systems. To emulate the cases that may occur in the uplink direction, we experimentally investigate the performance of superposing an uplink bursty LTE-A signal on the cascaded system using optical packet signal transmission. The performance of systems using different types of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), including a high-transient EDFA, an automatic-gain-control EDFA, and a burst-mode (BM) EDFA is evaluated and compared. We confirm that the dynamic transience of the EDFAs has a significant influence on the signal performance. By using a BM-EDFA, we confirm successful transmission of the uplink packetized LTE-A signal on the cascaded system. Both the measured error vector magnitude and the received optical power range metrics exceed the requirements. We also estimate the maximum transmission range of the RoR link, and it is confirmed that a sufficiently long range could be achieved for the applications in mobile front-haul networks.

Non-verbal communication incorporating visual, audio, and contextual information is important to make sense of and navigate the social world. Individuals who have trouble with social situations often have difficulty recognizing these sorts of non-verbal social signals. In this article, we propose a training tool NOCOA+ (Non-verbal COmmuniation for Autism plus) that uses utterances in visual and audio modalities in non-verbal communication training. We describe the design of NOCOA+, and further perform an experimental evaluation in which we examine its potential as a tool for computer-based training of non-verbal communication skills for people with social and communication difficulties. In a series of four experiments, we investigated 1) the effect of temporal context on the ability to recognize social signals in testing context, 2) the effect of modality of presentation of social stimulus on ability to recognize non-verbal information, 3) the correlation between autistic traits as measured by the autism spectrum quotient (AQ) and non-verbal behavior recognition skills measured by NOCOA+, 4) the effectiveness of computer-based training in improving social skills. We found that context information was helpful for recognizing non-verbal behaviors, and the effect of modality was different. The results also showed a significant relationship between the AQ communication and socialization scores and non-verbal communication skills, and that social skills were significantly improved through computer-based training.

We propose a one-step error detection and correction interface for a voice word processor. This correction interface performs analysis region detection, user intention understanding and error correction utterance recognition, all from a single user utterance input. We evaluate the performance of each component first, and then compare the effectiveness of our interface to two previous interfaces. Our evaluation demonstrates that each component is technically superior to the baselines and that our one-step error detection and correction method yields an error correction interface that is more convenient and natural than the two previous interfaces.

Irreversible k-conversion set is introduced in connection with the mathematical modeling of the spread of diseases or opinions. We show that the problem to find a minimum irreversible 2-conversion set can be solved in O(n2log 6n) time for graphs with maximum degree at most 3 (subcubic graphs) by reducing it to the graphic matroid parity problem, where n is the number of vertices in a graph. This affirmatively settles an open question posed by Kyncl et al. (2014).

A combination of nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ)-to-return-to-zero (RZ) waveform conversion and wavelength multicasting with pulsewidth tunability is experimentally demonstrated. A NRZ data signal is injected into a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF)-based four-wave mixing (FWM) switch with four RZ clocks compressed by a Raman amplification-based multiwavelength pulse compressor (RA-MPC). The NRZ signal is multicast and converted to RZ signals in a continuously wide pulsewidth tuning range between around 12.17 and 4.68 ps by changing the Raman pump power of the RA-MPC. Error-free operations of the converted RZ signals with different pulsewidths are achieved with negative power penalties compared with the back-to-back NRZ signal and the small variation among received powers of RZ output channels at a bit-error-rate (BER) of 10-9. The NRZ-to-RZ waveform conversion and wavelength multicasting without using the RA-MPC are also successfully implemented.

This paper investigates active period selection for cluster-based WSNs employing traffic adaptive IEEE 802.15.4 beacon enabled medium access control (MAC) under spatial non-uniform traffic and cluster mobility environments, and proposes a simple autonomous distributed superframe duration (SD) selection scheme to enhance network performance under such environments. The proposed scheme autonomously selects an active SD at each cluster head (CH) by using beacon reception power monitoring (conducted in distributed control manner) and also introduces a beacon status notice from sensor nodes (SNs) to their parent CHs in order to prevent unnecessary SD selection at CHs. Moreover, SD reuse mechanism and joint operation with previously proposed distributed backoff mechanism are proposed for the proposed SD selection scheme to further enhance the network performance. The results of computer simulation show that the proposed scheme can improve both the transmission and power efficiency performance of cluster-based WSNs under spatial non-uniform traffic and cluster mobility environments.