In the work we introduce novel approach to remote sensing from space for the estimation of sea wave heights with a spaceborne high precision two-frequency radar altimeter with nadir synthesis antenna aperture. Experiments show considerable reduction of the decorrelation factor of the correlation coefficient and so significant enhancement of the sensitivity of the altimeter for the estimation for the sea wave status.

We propose a new security model based on MLS Policy to achieve a better security performance on confidentiality, integrity and availability. First, it realizes a combination of BLP model and Biba model through a two-dimensional independent adjustment of integrity and confidentiality. And, the subject's access range is adjusted dynamically according to the security label of related objects and the subject's access history. Second, the security level of the trusted subject is extended to writing and reading privilege range respectively, following the principle of least privilege. Third, it adjusts the objects' security levels after adding confidential information to prevent the information disclosure. Fourth, it uses application-oriented logic to protect specific applications to avoid the degradation of security levels. Thus, it can ensure certain applications operate smoothly. Lastly, examples are presented to show the effectiveness and usability of the proposed model.

Joint transmit and receive antenna selection (JTRAS) is proposed for the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) two-way relaying channel. A simple and closed-form lower bound on the outage probability of JTRAS is derived. Furthermore, asymptotic analysis reveals that JTRAS can attain the maximum achievable diversity order of the MIMO dual-hop relaying channel.

400 V DC power distribution systems for data centers require a fast response DC circuit breaker is required. The semiconductor DC circuit breaker is an important key technology in DC power distribution systems. This paper considers the malfunction of Silicon Carbide- Static Induction Transistor (SiC-SIT) based DC circuit breakers in 400 V DC power distribution systems for data centers. The malfunction mechanism is explained, and a solution is proposed. Investigations are achieved by MATLAB/Simulink and experimental verification.

This paper presents a new type of electromagnetic interference (EMI) measurement system. An EMI Camera LSI (EMcam) with a 124 on-chip 25050 µm2 loop antenna matrix in 65 nm CMOS is developed. EMcam achieves both the 2D electric scanning and 60 µm-level spatial precision. The down-conversion architecture increases the bandwidth of EMcam and enables the measurement of EMI spectrum up to 3.3 GHz. The shared IF-block scheme is proposed to relax both the increase of power and area penalty, which are inherent issues of the matrix measurement. The power and the area are reduced by 74% and 73%, respectively. EMI measurement with the smallest 3212 µm2 antenna to date is also demonstrated.

Lazy-task creation is an efficient method of overcoming the overhead of the grain-size problem in parallel computing. Work stealing is an effective load balancing strategy for parallel computing. In this paper, we present dynamic work stealing strategies in a lazy-task creation technique for efficient fine-grain task scheduling. The basic idea is to control load balancing granularity depending on the number of task parents in a stack. The dynamic-length strategy of work stealing uses run-time information, which is information on the load of the victim, to determine the number of tasks that a thief is allowed to steal. We compare it with the bottommost first work stealing strategy used in StackThread/MP, and the fixed-length strategy of work stealing, where a thief requests to steal a fixed number of tasks, as well as other multithreaded frameworks such as Cilk and OpenMP task implementations. The experiments show that the dynamic-length strategy of work stealing performs well in irregular workloads such as in UTS benchmarks, as well as in regular workloads such as Fibonacci, Strassen's matrix multiplication, FFT, and Sparse-LU factorization. The dynamic-length strategy works better than the fixed-length strategy because it is more flexible than the latter; this strategy can avoid load imbalance due to overstealing.

In Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs), private L2 caches have potential benefits in future CMPs, e.g. small access latency, performance isolation, tile-friendly architecture and simple low bandwidth on-chip interconnect. But the major weakness of private cache is the higher cache miss rate caused by small private cache capacity. To deal with this problem, private caches can share capacity through spilling replaced blocks to other private caches. However, indiscriminate spilling can make capacity problem worse and influence performance negatively. This letter proposes throttling capacity sharing (TCS) for effective capacity sharing in private L2 caches. TCS determines whether to spill a replaced block by predicting reuse possibility, based on life time and reuse time. In our performance evaluation, TCS improves weighted speedup by 48.79%, 6.37% and 5.44% compared to non-spilling, Cooperative Caching with best spill probability (CC) and Dynamic Spill-Receive (DSR), respectively.

Topology control is one of the key issues in wireless networks. In this letter, we propose a simple topology control algorithm based on Connected Dominant Set (CDS) theory. The proposed algorithm uses less memory and less overhead cost than other existing schemes, and is therefore appropriate for implementation in wireless sensor networks. We will prove that the algorithm can form a CDS and guarantee network connectivity. The performance of our algorithm is demonstrated by simulation results.

A simple DFT-based noise variance estimator for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) systems is proposed. The conventional DFT-based estimator differentiates the channel impulse response and noise in the time domain. However, for partial frequency response, its time domain signal will leak to all taps due to the windowing effect. The noise and channel leakage power become mixed. In order to accurately derive the noise power, we propose a novel symmetric extension method to reduce the channel leakage power. This method is based on the improved signal continuity at the boundaries introduced by symmetric extension. Numerical results show that the normalized mean square error (NMSE) of our proposed method is significantly lower than that of the conventional DFT method.

This paper presents an ADPLL using a hierarchical TDC composed of a 4fLO DCO followed by a divide-by-4 circuit and three stages of known phase interpolators. We derived simple design requirements for ensuring precision of the phase interpolator. The proposed architecture provides immunity to PVT and local variations, which allows calibration-free operation, as well as sub-inverter delay resolution contributing to good in-band phase noise performance. Also the hierarchical TDC makes it possible to employ a selective activation scheme for power saving. Measured performances demonstrate the above advantages and the in-band phase noise reaches -104 dBc/Hz. It is fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process and the active area is 0.18 mm2.

Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are the most popular acoustic features used in automatic speech recognition (ASR), mainly because the coefficients capture the most useful information of the speech and fit well with the assumptions used in hidden Markov models. As is well known, MFCCs already employ several principles which have known counterparts in the peripheral properties of human hearing: decoupling across frequency, mel-warping of the frequency axis, log-compression of energy, etc. It is natural to introduce more mechanisms in the auditory periphery to improve the noise robustness of MFCC. In this paper, a k-nearest neighbors based frequency masking filter is proposed to reduce the audibility of spectra valleys which are sensitive to noise. Besides, Moore and Glasberg's critical band equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB) expression is utilized to determine the filter bandwidth. Furthermore, a new bandpass infinite impulse response (IIR) filter is proposed to imitate the temporal masking phenomenon of the human auditory system. These three auditory perceptual mechanisms are combined with the standard MFCC algorithm in order to investigate their effects on ASR performance, and a revised MFCC extraction scheme is presented. Recognition performances with the standard MFCC, RASTA perceptual linear prediction (RASTA-PLP) and the proposed feature extraction scheme are evaluated on a medium-vocabulary isolated-word recognition task and a more complex large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) task. Experimental results show that consistent robustness against background noise is achieved on these two tasks, and the proposed method outperforms both the standard MFCC and RASTA-PLP.

The lateral velocity is of importance in cases like target identification and traffic management. Conventional Doppler methods are not capable of measuring lateral velocities since they quantify only the radial component. Based on the spectrogram characteristic of laterally moving targets, an algorithm based on fractional Fourier transform has been studied in the signal processing literature. The algorithm searches the peak position of the transformation, and calculates the lateral velocity from the peak position. The performance analysis of this algorithm is carried out in this paper, which shows that this algorithm approaches Cramer-Rao bound with reasonable computational complexity. Simulations are conducted at last to compare the analytical performance and the experimental result.

This paper proposes a method of accurately detecting the boundary of narrow stripes, such as lane markings, by employing gradient cues of edge points. Using gradient direction cues, the edge points at the two sides of the boundary of stripes are classified into two groups before the Hough transform is applied to extract the boundary lines. The experiments show that the proposed method improves significantly the performance in terms of the accuracy of boundary detection of narrow stripes over the conventional approaches without edge point grouping.

In this paper, we propose a new method for the bias-dependent parameter extraction of a MOSFET, which covers DC to over 100 GHz. The DC MOSFET model provided by the chip foundry is assumed to be correct, and the core DC characteristics are designed to be asymptotically recovered at low frequencies. This is carried out by representing the corrections required at high frequencies using a bias-dependent Y matrix, assuming that a parasitic nonlinear two-port matrix (Y-wrapper) is connected in parallel with the core MOSFET. The Y-wrapper can also handle the nonreciprocity of the parasitic components, that is, the asymmetry of the Y matrix. The reliability of the Y-wrapper model is confirmed through the simulation and measurement of a one-stage common-source amplifier operating at several bias points. This paper will not discuss about non-linearity.

Internet threats caused by botnets/worms are one of the most important security issues to be addressed. Darknet, also called a dark IP address space, is one of the best solutions for monitoring anomalous packets sent by malicious software. However, since darknet is deployed only on an inactive IP address space, it is an inefficient way for monitoring a working network that has a considerable number of active IP addresses. The present paper addresses this problem. We propose a scalable, light-weight malicious packet monitoring system based on a multi-dimensional IP/port analysis. Our system significantly extends the monitoring scope of darknet. In order to extend the capacity of darknet, our approach leverages the active IP address space without affecting legitimate traffic. Multi-dimensional monitoring enables the monitoring of TCP ports with firewalls enabled on each of the IP addresses. We focus on delays of TCP syn/ack responses in the traffic. We locate syn/ack delayed packets and forward them to sensors or honeypots for further analysis. We also propose a policy-based flow classification and forwarding mechanism and develop a prototype of a monitoring system that implements our proposed architecture. We deploy our system on a campus network and perform several experiments for the evaluation of our system. We verify that our system can cover 89% of the IP addresses while darknet-based monitoring only covers 46%. On our campus network, our system monitors twice as many IP addresses as darknet.

To improve the robustness and transparency of spread spectrum (SS) based watermarking, this paper presents a new informed embedding strategy, which we call selective host-interference cancellation. We show that part of the host-interference in SS-based watermarking is beneficial to blind watermark extraction or detection, and can be utilized rather than removed. Utilizing this positive effect of the host itself can improve the watermark robustness without significantly sacrificing the media fidelity. The proposed strategy is realized by selectively applying improved SS (ISS) modulation to traditional SS watermarking. Theoretically, the error probability of the new method under additive white Gaussian noise attacks is several orders of magnitude lower than that of ISS for high signal-to-watermark ratios, and the required minimum watermark power is reduced by 3dB. Experiments were conducted on real audio signals, and the results show that our scheme is robust against most of common attacks even in high-transparency or high-payload applications.

The impact of non-ideal delay line (DL) along with group delay ripple (GDR) on the performance of ultra wide bandwidth (UWB) system has not yet been studied in previous literatures. In this paper, according to the currently designed DLs, we propose a statistical GDR model to achieve a practical UWB DL, and investigate the degradation in average bit error rate (BER) caused by the GDR for the transmitted-reference (TR) UWB communication systems. According to the analysis results, an improved autocorrelation receiver (AcR) is proposed. Through Monte Carlo simulations, the great performance improvement of the proposed AcR is verified by comparing it with the conventional TR AcR under non-ideal DL conditions. The proposed receiver framework is simple enough to enable a tractable analysis, and provides valuable insights for designing a practical TR UWB AcR that experiences GDR.

A direct inter-mode selection algorithm for P-frames in fast homogeneous H.264/AVC bit-rate reduction transcoding is proposed in this paper. To achieve the direct inter-mode selection, we firstly develop a low-complexity distortion estimation method for fast transcoding, in which the distortion is directly calculated from the decoded residual together with the reference frames. We also present a linear estimation method to approximate the coding rate. With the estimated distortion and rate, the rate-distortion cost can be easily computed in the transcoder. In our algorithm, a method based on the normalized rate difference of P-frames (RP) is used to detect the high motion scene. To achieve fast transcoding, only for the P-frames with RP larger than a threshold, the rate-distortion optimized (RDO) mode decision is performed; meanwhile, the average cost of each inter-mode (ACM) is calculated. Then for the subsequent frames transcoding, the optimal coding mode can be directly selected using the estimated cost and the ACM threshold. Experiments show that the proposed method can significantly simplify the complex RDO mode decision, and achieve transcoding time reductions of up to 62% with small loss of rate-distortion performance.

As the Internet represents a key social infrastructure, its reliability is essential if we are to survive failures. Physical connectivity of networks is also essential as it characterizes reliability. There are collaboration structures, which are topological structures where two or more nodes are connected to a node, and collaboration structures are observed in transcriptional regulatory networks and the router-level topologies of ISPs. These collaboration structures are related to the reliability of networks. The main objective of this research is to find whether an increase in collaboration structures would improve reliability or not. We first categorize the topology into a three-level hierarchy for this purpose, i.e., top-level, middle-level, and bottom-level layers. We then calculate the reliability of networks. The results indicate that the reliability of most transcriptional regulatory networks is higher than that of one of router-level topologies. We then investigate the number of collaboration structures. It is apparent that there are much fewer collaboration structures between top-level nodes and middle-level nodes in router-level topologies. Finally, we confirm that the reliability of router-level topologies can be improved by rewiring to increase the collaboration structures between top-level and middle-level nodes.

This letter summarizes three talks in the tutorial session of the 13th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium (APNOMS2011), which focused on the disaster recovery and further emergency management regarding the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. We present the damage and restoration of communication networks and points to a future disaster-resilient society.