This paper proposes reflection and transmission control panels using artificially designed materials. As the artificially designed material, finite- and infinite-length metal wire array sheets are used here. Laminated structures consisting of the metal wire array sheets and dielectric material are proposed. Reflection and transmission characteristics of these structures can be controlled by changing the metal wire parameters such as wire length, spacing gaps between the wires, and the dielectric material's thickness and relative permittivity. The reflection and transmission characteristics of the laminated structures are evaluated by measurements in free space and by transmission line theory.

This paper describes circuit design and measurement results of a newly proposed GaAs-HBT step-gain amplifier configuration and its application to a 3.3-3.6 GHz WiMAX power amplifier module for use in customer premises equipment. The step-gain amplifier implemented using only a usual HBT process is based on a current-mirror-based, base-collector diode switches and a passive attenuator core for the purpose of bypassing a power-gain stage. The stage allows an individual design approach in terms of gain and attenuation levels as well as large operating current reduction in the attenuation state. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed step-gain amplifier, a prototype of the amplifier was designed and fabricated, and then a WiMAX power amplifier module was also designed and fabricated as an application example of the proposed configuration to an amplifier product. Measurements are as follows. For a 3.5-V power supply and a 3.5-GHz non-modulated signal, the step-gain amplifier delivers 23.7 dBm of 1-dB gain compressed output power and 10.7 dB of linear gain in the amplification state. In the attenuation state, the amplifier exhibits 21 dBm of 1-dB gain expanded input power, -9.7 dB of gain, and 15 mA of current dissipation while keeping the gain stage switched off and maintaining input and output return loss of less than -10 dB at a 3.5-GHz band. The WiMAX amplifier operating with a 5-V supply voltage and a 64-QAM modulated signal is capable of delivering a 28.5-dBm linear output power, a 37-39 dB gain, and 15% of PAE over a wide frequency range from 3.3 to 3.6 GHz in the high-gain state while keeping error vector magnitude as low as 2.5%. This amplifier, which incorporates the proposed step-gain configuration into its interstage, enables a 24-dB gain reduction and a 45-mA large quiescent current reduction in the low-gain state.

With the development of wireless technologies, wireless relay systems have become a popular topic. To design practical wireless relay systems, link adaptation is an important technique. Because there are both broadcast and multiple access channels in wireless relay systems, link adaptation is difficult to design and hence the optimal throughput is hard to achieve. In this study, a novel method is proposed to maximize the system throughput of wireless relay systems by utilizing the most popular link adaptation methods, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ). The proposed method utilizes the characteristics and operations of AMC and HARQ to adaptively adjust the thresholds for selecting modulation and coding scheme (MCS) to be used. Thus the system can keep tracking the optimal values of the thresholds. Therefore, the system throughput can be maximized. We set up simulations for different relay environment settings, such as different relay HARQ protocols, placements, and multiplexing schemes, to verify the capability of the proposed method. The simulation results show that, compared to the existing method, the proposed method indeed improves system throughput under a variety of relay settings and can be easily applied to different system platforms.

In this paper, a new parameter estimator for coherently distributed (CD) noncircular (NC) signals is proposed, and can estimate both the central direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) and the angular spreads. It can also be considered as an extended version of the generalized Capon method by using both covariance matrix and an elliptic covariance matrix. The central DOAs and angular spreads are obtained by two-dimensional spectrum-peak searching. Numerical examples illustrate that the proposed method can estimate the central DOAs and the angular spreads when the number of signals is greater than the number of sensors. The proposed method also offers better performance than the methods against which it is compared.

The deployment of small cells is one of the most effective means to cope with the traffic explosion of cellular mobile systems. However, a small cell system increases the inter-cell interference, which limits the capacity and degrades the cell-edge user throughput. Inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC), such as fractional frequency reuse (FFR), is a well-known scheme that autonomously mitigates inter-cell interference. In the Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, the three-dimensional (3D) beamforming, which combines conventional horizontal beamforming and vertical beamforming, has been gaining increasing attention. This paper proposes a novel centralized ICIC scheme that controls the direction of narrow 3D beam for each frequency band of each base station. The centralized controller collects information from the base stations and calculates sub-optimum combinations of narrow beams so as to maximize the proportional fair (PF) utility of all users. This paper describes the throughput of the new centralized ICIC scheme as evaluated by computer simulations and shows it has a significant gain in both average user throughput and cell-edge user throughput compared with the conventional ICIC scheme. This paper also investigates the feasibility of the scheme by assessing its throughput performance in a realistic deployment scenario.

In this paper, we propose a method for reconstructing 3D sequential patterns from multiple images without knowing exact image correspondences and without calibrating linear camera sensitivity parameters on intensity. The sequential pattern is defined as a series of colored 3D points. We assume that the series of the points are obtained in multiple images, but the correspondence of individual points is not known among multiple images. For reconstructing sequential patterns, we consider a camera projection model which combines geometric and photometric information of objects. Furthermore, we consider camera projections in the frequency space. By considering the multi-view relationship on the new projection model, we show that the 3D sequential patterns can be reconstructed without knowing exact correspondence of individual image points in the sequential patterns; moreover, the recovered 3D patterns do not suffer from changes in linear camera sensitivity parameters. The efficiency of the proposed method is tested using real images.

In this Letter, we investigate the outage performance of MIMO amplify-and-forward (AF) multihop relay networks with maximum ratio transmission/receiver antenna selection (MRT/RAS) over Nakagami-m fading channels in the presence of co-channel interference (CCI) or not. In particular, the lower bounds for the outage probability of MIMO AF multihop relay networks with/without CCI are derived, which provides an efficient means to evaluate the joint effects of key system parameters, such as the number of antennas, the interfering power, and the severity of channel fading. In addition, the asymptotic behavior of the outage probability is investigated, and the results reveal that the full diversity order can be achieved regardless of CCI. In addition, simulation results are provided to show the correctness of our derived analytical results.

Vertical- and horizontal-polarization RCS of a dipole antenna was reduced using a switchable reflector. The switchable reflector can switch reflection level for the vertical-polarization and have absorption for the horizontal-polarization. The reflection level of the reflector for the vertical-polarization can be switched using pin diodes and the reflection for the horizontal-polarization can be reduced using resistor on the surface. The switchable reflector was designed to operate at 9 GHz and fabricated. The vertical-polarized reflection coefficient was switched -28 dB with OFF-state diodes and -0.7 dB with ON-state diodes, and horizontal-polarized one was less than -18 dB at 9 GHz. The reflector with ON-state diodes was applied to an antenna reflector of a dipole antenna and comparable radiation pattern to that with a metal reflector was obtained at 9 GHz. Moreover the reflector with OFF-state diodes was applied to the reflector of the dipole antenna and the RCS of the dipole antenna was reduced 18 dB for the vertical-polarization and 16 dB for the horizontal-polarization. Therefore the designed switchable reflector can contribute to antenna RCS reduction for dual-polarization at the operating frequency without degrading antenna performance.

We propose a method of spread spectrum digital watermarking with quantization index modulation (QIM) and evaluate the method on the basis of IHC evaluation criteria. The spread spectrum technique can make watermarks robust by using spread codes. Since watermarks can have redundancy, messages can be decoded from a degraded stego-image. Under IHC evaluation criteria, it is necessary to decode the messages without the original image. To do so, we propose a method in which watermarks are generated by using the spread spectrum technique and are embedded by QIM. QIM is an embedding method that can decode without an original image. The IHC evaluation criteria include JPEG compression and cropping as attacks. JPEG compression is lossy compression. Therefore, errors occur in watermarks. Since watermarks in stego-images are out of synchronization due to cropping, the position of embedded watermarks may be unclear. Detecting this position is needed while decoding. Therefore, both error correction and synchronization are required for digital watermarking methods. As countermeasures against cropping, the original image is divided into segments to embed watermarks. Moreover, each segment is divided into 8×8 pixel blocks. A watermark is embedded into a DCT coefficient in a block by QIM. To synchronize in decoding, the proposed method uses the correlation between watermarks and spread codes. After synchronization, watermarks are extracted by QIM, and then, messages are estimated from the watermarks. The proposed method was evaluated on the basis of the IHC evaluation criteria. The PSNR had to be higher than 30 dB. Ten 1920×1080 rectangular regions were cropped from each stego-image, and 200-bit messages were decoded from these regions. Their BERs were calculated to assess the tolerance. As a result, the BERs were less than 1.0%, and the average PSNR was 46.70 dB. Therefore, our method achieved a high image quality when using the IHC evaluation criteria. In addition, the proposed method was also evaluated by using StirMark 4.0. As a result, we found that our method has robustness for not only JPEG compression and cropping but also additional noise and Gaussian filtering. Moreover, the method has an advantage in that detection time is small since the synchronization is processed in 8×8 pixel blocks.

In wireless sensor networks, or WSNs, a malicious node is able to cover itself by switching between good and bad behaviors. Even when running under a reputation mechanism, such a node can still behave maliciously now and then so long as its reputation is within the acceptable level. To address this inconsistent behavior issue, a combined approach of statistic reputation and time series is proposed in this study, in which the negative binomial reputation is applied to rate the nodes' reputation and concept of time series is borrowed to analyze the reputation results. Simulations show that the proposed method can effectively counter inconsistent behavior nodes and thus improves the overall system performance.

This paper presents an information hiding method for DNA steganography with which a massive amount of data can be hidden in a noncoding strand. Our method maps the encrypted data to the DNA sequence using a numerical mapping table, before concealing it in the noncoding sequence using a secret key comprising sector length and the random number generator's seed. Our encoding algorithm is sector-based and reference dependent. Using modular arithmetic, we created a unique binary-base translation for every sector. By conducting a simulation study, we showed that our method could preserve amino acid information, extract hidden data without reference to the host DNA sequence, and detect the position of mutation error. Experimental results verified that our method produced higher data capacity than conventional methods, with a bpn (bit-per-nucleotide) value that ranged from approximately 1-2, depending on the selected sector length. Additionally, our novel method detected the positions of mutation errors by the presence of a parity base in each sector.

In emerging wearable sensor systems, it is crucial to save energy because these systems are severely energy-constrained. For making the sensors in these systems energy efficient, transmission power control (TPC) is widely used, and thus far, many TPC algorithms have been proposed in the literature. However, these TPC algorithms do not always work well in all wireless body channel conditions, which are capriciously varied due to diverse sensor environments such as sensor placements, body movements, and body locations. In this paper, we propose a simple TPC algorithm that quickly and stably approaches the optimal transmission power level and works well in all wearable sensor environments. We experimentally evaluated the proposed TPC algorithm and proved that it works well under all wireless body channel conditions.

New target specific absorption rate (SAR) values, calculated using a proposed reference dipole antenna and the reference flat phantom, are presented for an SAR validation test at 150MHz. The reference flat phantom recommended by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard for 150MHz requires a significant amount of liquid owing to its large size. We conduct a numerical analysis in order to reduce the size of the flat phantom. The optimum size of the flat phantom is 780 (L1) × 540 (W) × 200 (H)mm3, which is approximately a 64% reduction in volume compared to the reference flat phantom. The length of the reference dipole antenna required for the optimized flat phantom (extrapolated from the reference values at 300MHz) becomes 760mm. The calculated and measured return losses (S11) of the antenna at 150MHz are 24.1dB and 22dB, respectively. The calculated and measured results for the return loss of the dipole antenna agree well and satisfy the IEC standard (> 20dB). The target SAR values derived from the numerical analysis are 1.08W/kg for 1g of tissue and 0.77W/kg for 10g of tissue for an SAR validation test at 150MHz.

This paper reports on the trending literature of occlusion handling in the task of online visual tracking. The discussion first explores visual tracking realm and pinpoints the necessity of dedicated attention to the occlusion problem. The findings suggest that although occlusion detection facilitated tracking impressively, it has been largely ignored. The literature further showed that the mainstream of the research is gathered around human tracking and crowd analysis. This is followed by a novel taxonomy of types of occlusion and challenges arising from it, during and after the emergence of an occlusion. The discussion then focuses on an investigation of the approaches to handle the occlusion in the frame-by-frame basis. Literature analysis reveals that researchers examined every aspect of a tracker design that is hypothesized as beneficial in the robust tracking under occlusion. State-of-the-art solutions identified in the literature involved various camera settings, simplifying assumptions, appearance and motion models, target state representations and observation models. The identified clusters are then analyzed and discussed, and their merits and demerits are explained. Finally, areas of potential for future research are presented.

Breast cancer is a serious disease across the world, and it is one of the largest causes of cancer death for women. The traditional diagnosis is not only time consuming but also easily affected. Hence, artificial intelligence (AI), especially neural networks, has been widely used to assist to detect cancer. However, in recent years, the computational ability of a neuron has attracted more and more attention. The main computational capacity of a neuron is located in the dendrites. In this paper, a novel neuron model with dendritic nonlinearity (NMDN) is proposed to classify breast cancer in the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Database (WBCD). In NMDN, the dendrites possess nonlinearity when realizing the excitatory synapses, inhibitory synapses, constant-1 synapses and constant-0 synapses instead of being simply weighted. Furthermore, the nonlinear interaction among the synapses on a dendrite is defined as a product of the synaptic inputs. The soma adds all of the products of the branches to produce an output. A back-propagation-based learning algorithm is introduced to train the NMDN. The performance of the NMDN is compared with classic back propagation neural networks (BPNNs). Simulation results indicate that NMDN possesses superior capability in terms of the accuracy, convergence rate, stability and area under the ROC curve (AUC). Moreover, regarding ROC, for continuum values, the existing 0-connections branches after evolving can be eliminated from the dendrite morphology to release computational load, but with no influence on the performance of classification. The results disclose that the computational ability of the neuron has been undervalued, and the proposed NMDN can be an interesting choice for medical researchers in further research.

A power allocation to active and reactive power in stochastic resonance is discussed for energy harvesting from noise. It is confirmed that active power can be increased at stochastic resonance, in the same way of the relationship between energy and phase at an appropriate setting in resonance.

For the electric demand prediction problem, a modification mechanism of predicted demand data has been proposed in the previous work. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the modification mechanism in power balancing control. Then, we analytically derive an upper bound of the performance, which is characterized by system parameters and prediction precision.

This paper presents wireless systems for use in disaster recovery operations. The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 reinforced the importance of communications in, to, and between disaster areas as lifelines. It also revealed that conventional wireless systems used for disaster recovery need to be renovated to cope with technological changes and to provide their services with easier operations. To address this need we have developed new systems, which include a relay wireless system, subscriber wireless systems, business radio systems, and satellite communication systems. They will be chosen and used depending on the situations in disaster areas as well as on the required services.

In this paper, for an odd prime p and i=0,1, we investigate the cross-correlation between two decimated sequences, s(2t+i) and s(dt), where s(t) is a p-ary m-sequence of period pn-1. Here we consider two cases of ${d}$, ${d=rac{(p^m +1)^2}{2} }$ with ${n=2m}$, ${p^m equiv 1 pmod{4}}$ and ${d=rac{(p^m +1)^2}{p^e + 1}}$ with n=2m and odd m/e. The value distribution of the cross-correlation function for each case is completely determined. Also, by using these decimated sequences, two new p-ary sequence families of period ${rac{p^n -1}{2}}$ with good correlation property are constructed.

Novel multi-band mixers that can receive multiple band signals concurrently are proposed and evaluated. The mixers achieve independent gain control through novel relative power control method of the multiple local oscillator (LO) signals. Linear control is also achieved through multiple LO signal input with total LO power control. Theoretical analysis shows that odd-order nonlinearity components of the multiple LO signals support linear conversion gain control. Dual- and triple-band tests are conducted using typical three MOSFET mixers fabricated by a 0.25 µm SiGe BiCMOS process. Measurements confirm over 40 dB independent control of conversion gain, linear control achieved through LO input power control. The proposed mixers have high input linearity with a 5 dBm output third intercept point. A method is also proposed to reduce interference caused by mixing between multiple LO signals.