This paper presents an inductive coupling interface using a relay transmission scheme and a low-skew 3D clock distribution network synchronized with an external reference clock source for 3D chip stacking. A relayed transmission scheme using one coil is proposed to reduce the number of coils in a data link. Coupled resonation is utilized for clock and data recovery (CDR) for the first time in the world, resulting in the elimination of a source-synchronous clock link. As a result, the total number of coils required is reduced to one-fifth of the conventional number required, yielding a significant improvement in data rate, layout area, and energy consumption. A low-skew 3D clock distribution network utilizes vertically coupled LC oscillators and horizontally coupled ring oscillators. The proposed frequency-locking and phase-pulling scheme widens the lock range to $pm$ 10%. Two test chips were designed and fabricated in 0.18 $mu$m CMOS. The bandwidth of the proposed interface using relay transmission ThruChip Interface (TCI) is 2.7 Gb/s/mm$^2$; energy consumption per chip is 0.9 pJ/b/chip. Clock skew is less than 18- and 25- ps under a 1.8- and 0.9- V supply. The distributed RMS jitter is smaller than 1.72 ps.

In this paper, we propose an analog cancellation scheme for multipath self-interference channels in full-duplex wireless orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The conventional approaches emulate the radio-frequency (RF) self-interference signals by passing the RF transmit signals through delay lines and programmable attenuators. By contrast, our proposed scheme computes the phase-rotated and weighted versions of the baseband transmit signals in the baseband domain, which are simply upconverted to obtain the emulated RF self-interference signals. Numerical results are presented to verify the suppression performance of the proposed scheme.

This letter presents a method to adaptively counter false data injection attacks (FDIAs) in wireless sensor networks, in which a fuzzy rule-based system detects FDIAs and chooses the most appropriate countermeasures. The method does not require en-route verification processes and manual parameter settings. The effectiveness of the method is shown with simulation results.

This manuscript presents a simple scheme to improve the performance of a feedback control system that uses power line channels for its feedback loop. The noise and attenuation of power lines, and thus the signal to noise ratio, are known to be cyclostationary. Such cyclic features in the channel allow us to predict virtually error free transmission instants as well as instants of high probability of errors. This paper introduces and evaluates the effectiveness of a packet transmission scheduling that collaborates with a predictive control scheme adapted to this cyclostationary environment. In other words, we explore the cooperation between the physical and application layers of the system in order to achieve an overall optimization. To rate the control quality of the system we evaluate its stability as well as its ability to follow control commands accurately. We compare a scheme of increased packet rate against our proposed scheme which emulates a high packet rate with the use of predictive control. Through this comparison, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme to improve the control quality of the system, even under low signal to noise ratio conditions in the cyclostationary channel.

A 60-GHz CMOS transmitter with on-chip antenna for high-speed short-range wireless interconnections is presented. The radiation gain of the on-chip antenna is doubled using helium-3 ion irradiation technique. The transmitter core is composed of a resistive-feedback RF amplifier, a double-balanced passive mixer, and an injection-locked oscillator. The wideband and power-saving design of the transmitter core guarantees the low-power and high-data-rate characteristic. The transmitter fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process achieves 5-Gb/s data rate with an EVM performance of $-$12 dB for BPSK modulation at a distance of 1,mm. The whole transmitter consumes 17,mW from a 1.2-V supply and occupies a core area of 0.64,mm$^{2}$ including the on-chip antenna. The gain-enhanced antenna together with the wideband and power-saving design of the transmitter provides a low-power low-cost full on-chip solution for the short-range high-data-rate wireless communication.

This paper discusses the perspectives of using a wake-up receiver (WUR) in wireless body area network (WBAN) applications with event-driven data transfers. First we compare energy efficiency between the WUR-based and the duty-cycled medium access control protocol -based IEEE 802.15.6 compliant WBAN. Then, we review the architectures of state-of-the-art WURs and discuss their suitability for WBANs. The presented results clearly show that the radio frequency envelope detection based architecture features the lowest power consumption at a cost of sensitivity. The other architectures are capable of providing better sensitivity, but consume more power. Finally, we propose the design modification that enables using a WUR to receive the control commands beside the wake-up signals. The presented results reveal that use of this feature does not require complex modifications of the current architectures, but enables to improve energy efficiency and latency for small data blocks transfers.

This paper focuses on system level simulation of heterogeneous networks (HetNet). Aiming at the imbalance offloading of macro cell and pico cell under the macro-pico coexistence case, we propose an adaptive cell-specific association strategy for HetNet to ensure that users can be served equitably by both macro cell and pico cell. The traditional cell range expansion (CRE) scheme with bias-based cell association has fixed bias values for all pico cells. Our proposal, on the other hand, sets different thresholds of attached users for all MeNB (macro enhanced node B) and PeNBs (pico enhanced node B), and all cell-specific biases are obtained by the proposed adaptive association strategy according to different cell-specific predefined thresholds. With this strategy, the load imbalance between MeNB and different PeNBs is well alleviated, and hence the entire network performance is elevated. Moreover, due to the newly deployed low-power nodes in HetNets, the achieved spectral efficiency of users, especially for cell edge users, is also affected by the downlink inter-cell interference. The idea we put forward is to combine the frequency and power coordination, and so suppress the inter-cell interference. Finally in this paper, we present some numerical results to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

We investigated client honeypots for detecting and circumstantially analyzing drive-by download attacks. A client honeypot requires both improved inspection performance and in-depth analysis for inspecting and discovering malicious websites. However, OS overhead in recent client honeypot operation cannot be ignored when improving honeypot multiplication performance. We propose a client honeypot system that is a combination of multi-OS and multi-process honeypot approaches, and we implemented this system to evaluate its performance. The process sandbox mechanism, a security measure for our multi-process approach, provides a virtually isolated environment for each web browser. It prevents system alteration from a compromised browser process by I/O redirection of file/registry access. To solve the inconsistency problem of file/registry view by I/O redirection, our process sandbox mechanism enables the web browser and corresponding plug-ins to share a virtual system view. Therefore, it enables multiple processes to be run simultaneously without interference behavior of processes on a single OS. In a field trial, we confirmed that the use of our multi-process approach was three or more times faster than that of a single process, and our multi-OS approach linearly improved system performance according to the number of honeypot instances. In addition, our long-term investigation indicated that 72.3% of exploitations target browser-helper processes. If a honeypot restricts all process creation events, it cannot identify an exploitation targeting a browser-helper process. In contrast, our process sandbox mechanism permits the creation of browser-helper processes, so it can identify these types of exploitations without resulting in false negatives. Thus, our proposed system with these multiplication approaches improves performance efficiency and enables in-depth analysis on high interaction systems.

A survey was conducted on the use of ICT by visually impaired people. Among 304 respondents, 81 used smartphones and 44, tablets. Blind people used feature phones at a higher rate and smartphones and tablets at lower rates than people with low vision. The most popular smartphone model was iPhone and the most popular tablet model was iPad. While almost all blind users used the speech output accessibility feature and only a few of them used visual features, low vision users used both visual features such as Zoom, Large text, and Invert colors and speech output at high rates both on smartphones and tablets. The most popular text entry methods were different between smartphones and tablets. For smartphones flick and numeric keypad input were popular among low vision users while voice input was the most popular among blind users. For tablets a software QWERTY keyboard was the most popular among both blind and low vision users. The advantages of smartphones were access to geographical information, quick Web browsing, voice input, and extensibility for both blind and low vision users, object recognition for blind users, and readability for low vision users. Tablets also work as a vision aid for people with low vision. The drawbacks of smartphones and tablets were text entry and touch operation difficulties and inaccessible apps for both blind and low vision users, problems in speech output for blind users, and problems in readability for low vision users. Researchers and makers of operating systems (OS) and apps should assume responsibility for solving these problems.

Fault localization is essential for conducting effective program repair. However, preliminary studies have shown that existing fault localization approaches do not take the requirements of automatic repair into account, and therefore restrict the repair performance. To address this issue, this paper presents the first study on designing fault localization approaches for automatic program repair, that is, we propose a fault localization approach using failure-related contexts in order to improve automatic program repair. The proposed approach first utilizes program slicing technique to construct a failure-related context, then evaluates the suspiciousness of each element in this context, and finally transfers the result of evaluation to automatic program repair techniques for performing repair on faulty programs. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective to improve automatic repair performance.

This paper presents the electrical contact behaviors of Au-plated material at super low making and breaking velocity conditions by introducing our new designed test rig. The fundamental phenomena in the contact voltage and contact force versus piezoactuator displacement curves were investigated under the load current of 1A and velocity of 50,nm/s. From the repetitive experimental results, we found that the adhesion phenomena during the unloading process are closely correlative with the initial contact stage in the loading process. Furthermore, a mathematical model which is relative to the variation of contact force in loading is built, thus the physical mechanism of adhesion and principal factors of gold-plated materials are discussed. Finally, the physical process of molten bridge under the no mechanical contact situation is also analyzed in detail.

In this letter, we prove that the Kurosawa-Desmedt (KD) scheme [10], which belongs to the hybrid framework, is KDM-CCA secure w.r.t. an ensemble proposed by Qin et al. in [12] under the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. Since our proof does not rely on the random oracle model, we partially answer the question presented by Davies and Stam in [7], where they hope to achieve the KDM-CCA security for hybrid encryption scheme in the standard model (i.e. not random oracle model). Moreover, our result may also make sense in practice since KD-scheme is (almost) the most efficient CCA secure scheme.

Recommender systems, which provide users with recommendations of content suited to their needs, have received great attention in today's online business world. However, most recommendation approaches exploit only a single source of input data and suffer from the data sparsity problem and the cold start problem. To improve recommendation accuracy in this situation, additional sources of information, such as friend relationship and user-generated tags, should be incorporated in recommendation systems. In this paper, we revise the user-based collaborative filtering (CF) technique, and propose two recommendation approaches fusing user-generated tags and social relations in a novel way. In order to evaluate the performance of our approaches, we compare experimental results with two baseline methods: user-based CF and user-based CF with weighted friendship similarity using the real datasets (Last.fm and Movielens). Our experimental results show that our methods get higher accuracy. We also verify our methods in cold-start settings, and our methods achieve more precise recommendations than the compared approaches.

In this paper, an energy harvesting architecture in an Underlay Cooperative Cognitive Network (UCCN) is investigated, in which power constrained Decode-and-Forward relays harvest energy from radio-frequency signals received from a source, and then consume the harvested energy by forwarding the recoded signals to their destination. These recoded signals are launched by a transmitting power which is the harvested energy per a time interval. Based on the energy harvesting architectures that have been studied, two operation protocols are proposed: UCCN with Power Splitting architecture (UCCN-PS), and UCCN with Time Switching architecture (UCCN-TS). The best cooperative relay in both protocols is taken to be the one that satisfies the following conditions: maximum harvested energy, and maximum decoding capacity. As a result of the best relay selection, the signal quality of the selected link from the best relay to the destination is enhanced by the maximum harvested energy. The system performance of the secondary network in the UCCN-PS and UCCN-TS protocols is analyzed and evaluated by the exact closed-form outage probabilities and throughput analyses over Rayleigh fading channels. The Monte Carlo simulation method is performed to verify the theoretical expressions. Evaluations based on outage probability and throughput show that the system performance of the secondary network in the UCCN-PS and UCCN-TS protocols improves when the number of cooperative relays and the interference constraint increase as well as when the primary receiver is farther from the transmitting nodes such as the source and relays of the secondary network. In addition, the throughput performance of the UCCN-PS protocol outperforms that of the UCCN-TS protocol. Finally, the effects of the power splitting ratio, energy harvesting time, energy conversion efficiency, target Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), and location of cooperative relays on the system performance of the secondary network are presented and discussed.

A number of network monitoring sensors such as honeypot and web crawler have been launched to observe increasingly-sophisticated cyber attacks. Based on these technologies, there have been several large scale network monitoring projects launched to fight against cyber threats on the Internet. Meanwhile, these projects are facing some problems such as Difficulty of collecting wide range darknet, Burden of honeypot operation and Blacklisting problem of honeypot address. In order to address these problems, this paper proposes a novel proactive cyber attack monitoring platform called GHOST sensor, which enables effective utilization of physical and logical resources such as hardware of sensors and monitoring IP addresses as well as improves the efficiency of attack information collection. The GHOST sensor dynamically allocates targeted IP addresses to appropriate sensors so that the sensors can flexibly monitor attacks according to profiles of each attacker. Through an evaluation in a experiment environment, this paper presents the efficiency of attack observation and resource utilization.

The field electron emission characteristics of a p-type Si emitter sharpened by a spirally scanned Ga focused-ion-beam milling process were investigated. Saturated Fowler--Nordheim (F--N) plots, which are unique phenomena of p-type semiconductor emitters, were observed. The slight increase of the emission current in the saturated F--N plots region was discussed in terms of the depletion layer width in which electron generation occurs. The temperature dependence of the field electron emission current was also discussed. The activation energy of carrier generation was determined to be 0.26,eV, ascribable to the surface states that accompany the defects introduced by the Ga ion beam. When the emitter was irradiated by a 650-nm-wavelength laser, the increase in the emission current, i.e., the photoexcited emission current, was observed in the saturated region of the F--N plots. The photoexcited emission current was proportional to the laser intensity.

The research of detecting co-saliency over multiple images is just beginning. The existing methods multiply the saliency on single image by the correspondence over multiple images to estimate co-saliency. They have difficulty in highlighting the co-salient object that is not salient on single image. It is caused by two problems. (1) The correspondence computation lacks precision. (2) The co-saliency multiplication formulation does not fully consider the effect of correspondence for co-saliency. In this paper, we propose a novel co-saliency detection scheme linearly combining foreground correspondence and single-view saliency. The progressive graph matching based foreground correspondence method is proposed to improve the precision of correspondence computation. Then the foreground correspondence is linearly combined with single-view saliency to compute co-saliency. According to the linear combination formulation, high correspondence could bring about high co-saliency, even when single-view saliency is low. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art co-saliency methods.

In this short correspondence, (1+uv)-constacyclic codes over the finite non-chain ring R[v]/(v2+v) are investigated, where R=F2+uF2 with u2=0. Some structural properties of this class of constacyclic codes are studied. Further, some optimal binary linear codes are obtained from these constacyclic codes.

Nowadays, computer systems are limited by the power and memory wall. As the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) has dominated the power consumption in modern devices, developing power-saving approaches on DRAM has become more and more important. Among several techniques on different abstract levels, scheduling-based power management policies can be applied to existing memory controllers to reduce power consumption without causing severe performance degradation. Existing power-aware schedulers cluster memory requests into sets, so that the large portion of the DRAM can be switched into the power saving mode; however, only the target addresses are taken into consideration when clustering, while we observe the types (read or write) of requests can play an important role. In this paper, we propose two scheduling-based power management techniques on the DRAM controller: the inter-rank read-write aware clustering approach greatly reduces the active standby power, and the intra-rank read-write aware reordering approach mitigates the performance degradation. The simulation results show that the proposed techniques effectively reduce 75% DRAM power on average. Compared with the existing policy, the power reduction is 10% more on average with comparable or less performance degradation for the proposed techniques.

Recommendation systems have been widely used in E-commerce sites, social media and etc. An important recommendation task is to predict items that a user will perform actions on with users' historical data, which is called top-K recommendation. Recently, there is huge amount of emerging items which are divided into a variety of categories and researchers have argued or suggested that top-K recommendation of item category could be very beneficial for users to make better and faster decisions. However, the traditional methods encounter some common but crucial problems in this scenario because additional information, such as time, is ignored. The ranking algorithm on graphs and the increasingly growing amount of online user behaviors shed some light on these problems. We propose a construction method of time-aware graphs to use ranking algorithm for personalized recommendation of item category. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of our proposed method over competitive baseline algorithms.