The induced voltage at the terminals of an implantable cardiac pacemaker of unipolar type was investigated by numerical calculations. Operating frequency was assumed 5 MHz according to a recent product. The dependencies of the induced voltage on various conditions were investigated including those on the locations of the transmitter and the pacemaker, and on the electric properties and the size of the phantom. The results showed that they were reasonably explained by considerations of quasi-static coupling of the electric field between the device and the pacemaker. Regarding the effect of electrical properties of the phantom a conservative result was obtained by using a phantom of homogeneous material with electric constants of fat. With regard to the phantom size the phantom used in previous studies provided more conservative results than that of larger size. The results suggested that the electric near-field intra-body communication devices are not likely to interfere with implantable cardiac pacemakers as far as the situation assumed in this study.

The paper is devoted to the experimental study of the arc plasma characteristics in SF6, N2 and CO2. To one flexible model of gas circuit breaker, short circuit experiments have been carried out considering the influence of contact gap (4–12 mm), gas pressure (1–5 atm), short circuit current (1–5 kA effective value) as well as gas species particularly. During the experiments, the arc image, arc current and arc voltage are recorded by the high speed camera, shunt and voltage transducer, respectively. It demonstrates that to the above mentioned three kinds of gases, the arc radius and arc voltage increase with the short circuit current and gas pressure normally; however, under the same experimental conditions, N2 arc holds the minimum arc radius and the maximum arc voltage, and the arc voltage of SF6 arc is the lowest.

The marking construction problem (MCP) of Petri nets is defined as follows: “Given a Petri net N, an initial marking Mi and a target marking Mt, construct a marking that is closest to Mt among those which can be reached from Mi by firing transitions.” MCP includes the well-known marking reachability problem of Petri nets. MCP is known to be NP-hard, and we propose two schemas of heuristic algorithms: (i) not using any algorithm for the maximum legal firing sequence problem (MAX LFS) or (ii) using an algorithm for MAX LFS. Moreover, this paper proposes four pseudo-polynomial time algorithms: MCG and MCA for (i), and MCHFk and MC_feideq_a for (ii), where MCA (MC_feideq_a, respectively) is an improved version of MCG (MCHFk). Their performance is evaluated through results of computing experiment.

In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective, multiuser detection scheme for a two-hop cooperative CDMAs. In phase 1, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) detector at the destination is used to identify reliable decisions of direct transmissions from the sources and return them to the relays. Then, in phase 2, based on the reliable decisions, the relays and the destination successively utilize the maximum likelihood (ML) detectors to estimate the residual symbols. Due to the destination estimating the symbols separately from direct transmissions and the relaying signals, as a result the destination does not need the information about the relays' decision performance for the construction of the ML detector. Hence, the proposed scheme is more feasible than existing approaches for practical implementation. In addition, due to the ML detectors in phase 2 only estimating the residual symbols, the number of computations performed by the ML detectors can be reduced significantly. The results of simulations and complexity analysis demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

When contact failure occurs in a connector in a coaxial high-frequency (HF) signal transmission line, it is well known that common-mode (CM) radiation occurs on the line. We focus on contact conditions in a connector causing such CM radiation. Experiments and simulations verify that CM radiation increases as the contact resistance increases. While the CM current strongly depends on the distribution pattern of contact resistances at a low resistance, the CM current does not depend on these pattern at a high resistance. Our results indicate that it is important to maintain a symmetrical distribution of contact spots whenever the number of such spots is four or more.

Silver electrical contacts are separated to generate break arcs in a DC48 V/6-24 A resistive circuit. The transverse magnetic field formed by a permanent magnet is applied to the break arcs. A series of experiments are carried out for two different experimental conditions. One condition is a constant contact separating speed while the magnetic flux density is changed to investigate the shortening effect of the arc duration. Another condition is a constant magnetic flux density while the contact separating speed is changed to investigate the changes in the arc duration and the contact gap when the break arc is extinguished. As a result, with constant separating speed, it is confirmed that the duration of break arcs is shortened by the transverse magnetic field and the break arcs are extinguished when the arc length reaches a certain value L. Under the condition of constant transverse magnetic field, (i) the arc duration is shortened by increasing the separation speed; (ii) the contact gap when the break arc is extinguished is almost constant when the separating speed v is sufficiently faster than 5 mm/s.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a supply and process-insensitive 12-bit Digital Pulse Width Modulator (DPWM) for digital DC-DC converters. The DPWM is realized by a ring oscillator-based segmented tapped delay line and a counter-comparator. The number of delay cells required is reduced by employing a proposed delay cell reuse technique. The ring oscillator of the tapped delay line is made insensitive to supply and process variation by biasing the differential delay cells with a supply-insensitive replica bias circuit. Simulation results show that the variation of the switching frequency of the DPWM at 1.02 MHz is 0.4% for supply voltage variation between 1.5 V and 2.5 V and 0.95% over the temperature range from -40 to 90. Monte-Carlo simulation was also performed to account for the effect of mismatch between the transistors of the ring oscillator. The worst case delay of the delay cells is 0.87% for 5% (3-σ) mismatch. The design was fabricated in CMOS 0.18 µm process and the fabricated DPWM achieved a supply sensitivity of 0.82% and a current consumption of 14 µA.

Proving the security of cancelable biometrics and other template protection techniques is a key prerequisite for the widespread deployment of biometric technologies. BioEncoding is a cancelable biometrics scheme that has been proposed recently to protect biometric templates represented as binary strings like iris codes. Unlike other template protection schemes, BioEncoding does not require user-specific keys or tokens. Moreover, it satisfies the requirements of untraceable biometrics without sacrificing the matching accuracy. However, the security of BioEncoding against smart attacks, such as correlation and optimization-based attacks, has to be proved before recommending it for practical deployment. In this paper, the security of BioEncopding, in terms of both non-invertibility and privacy protection, is analyzed. First, resistance of protected templates generated using BioEncoding against brute-force search attacks is revisited rigorously. Then, vulnerabilities of BioEncoding with respect to correlation attacks and optimization based attacks are identified and explained. Furthermore, an important modification to the BioEncoding algorithm is proposed to enhance its security against correlation attacks. The effect of integrating this modification into BioEncoding is validated and its impact on the matching accuracy is investigated empirically using CASIA-IrisV3-Interval dataset. Experimental results confirm the efficacy of the proposed modification and show that it has no negative impact on the matching accuracy.

With energy shortages and global climate change leading our concerns these days, the energy consumption of datacenters has become a key issue. Obviously, a substantial reduction in energy consumption can be made by powering down servers when they are not in use. This paper aims at designing, implementing and evaluating a Green Scheduler for reducing energy consumption of datacenters in Cloud computing platforms. It is composed of four algorithms: prediction, ON/OFF, task scheduling, and evaluation algorithms. The prediction algorithm employs a neural predictor to predict future load demand based on historical demand. According to the prediction, the ON/OFF algorithm dynamically adjusts server allocations to minimize the number of servers running, thus minimizing the energy use at the points of consumption to benefit all other levels. The task scheduling algorithm is responsible for directing request traffic away from powered-down servers and toward active servers. The performance is monitored by the evaluation algorithm to balance the system's adaptability against stability. For evaluation, we perform simulations with two load traces. The results show that the prediction mode, with a combination of dynamic training and dynamic provisioning of 20% additional servers, can reduce energy consumption by 49.8% with a drop rate of 0.02% on one load trace, and a drop rate of 0.16% with an energy consumption reduction of 55.4% on the other. Our method is also proven to have a distinct advantage over its counterparts.

The advantages of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are high spectral efficiency, resiliency to RF interference, lower multi-path distortion and others. To further utilize the vast channel capacity of the multiuser OFDM, one has to find the efficient adaptive subcarrier and bit allocation among users. In this paper, we propose a 0-1 integer programming model formulating the optimal subcarrier and bit allocation problem of the multiuser OFDM. We proved that the continuous relaxation of our formulation is tighter than the previous convex optimization formulation based on perspective function and the Lagrangian dual bound of our formulation is equivalent to the linear programming relaxation bound. The proposed Lagrangian dual is seperable with respect to subcarriers and allows an efficient dual maximization algorithm. We compared the performance of the integer programming formulation and the Lagrangian dual of our formulation and the continuous relaxation and the primal heuristic proposed in [3]. Computer simulation on a system employing M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) assuming a frequency-selective channel consisting of three independent Rayleigh multipaths is carried out with the optimal subcarrier and bit allocation solution generated by the 0-1 integer programming model.

An Energy-efficient Flexible Beacon Scheduling (EFBS) mechanism is proposed to solve the beacon collision problem in cluster-tree healthcare systems. In EFBS, after clustering, BAN Coordinators perform power control. Then they are divided into groups and each group is assigned one contention-free time-slot. The duration of the beacon-only period is flexible. According to the simulation results, EFBS provides better performance than other beacon scheduling approaches.

We propose a system that, using video information, segments the mouth region from a face image and then detects the protrusion of the tongue from inside the oral cavity. Initially, under the assumption that the mouth is closed, we detect both mouth corners. We use a set of specifically oriented Gabor filters for enhancing horizontal features corresponding to the shadow existing between the upper and lower lips. After applying the Hough line detector, the extremes of the line that was found are regarded as the mouth corners. Detection rate for mouth corner localization is 85.33%. These points are then input to a mouth appearance model which fits a mouth contour to the image. By segmenting its bounding box we obtain a mouth template. Next, considering the symmetric nature of the mouth, we divide the template into right and left halves. Thus, our system makes use of three templates. We track the mouth in the following frames using normalized correlation for mouth template matching. Changes happening in the mouth region are directly described by the correlation value, i.e., the appearance of the tongue in the surface of the mouth will cause a decrease in the correlation coefficient through time. These coefficients are used for detecting the tongue protrusion. The right and left tongue protrusion positions will be detected by analyzing similarity changes between the right and left half-mouth templates and the currently tracked ones. Detection rates under the default parameters of our system are 90.20% for the tongue protrusion regardless of the position, and 84.78% for the right and left tongue protrusion positions. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of real-time tongue protrusion detection in vision-based systems and motivates further investigating the usage of this new modality in human-computer communication.

This paper proposes a low-complexity signal detection algorithm for spatially correlated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. The proposed algorithm sets a minimum mean-square error (MMSE) detection result to the starting point, and searches for signal candidates in multi-dimensions of the noise enhancement from which the MMSE detection suffers. The multi-dimensional search is needed because the number of dominant directions of the noise enhancement is likely to be more than one over the correlated MIMO channels. To reduce the computational complexity of the multi-dimensional search, the proposed algorithm limits the number of signal candidates to O(NT) where NT is the number of transmit antennas and O( ) is big O notation. Specifically, the signal candidates, which are unquantized, are obtained as the solution of a minimization problem under a constraint that a stream of the candidates should be equal to a constellation point. Finally, the detected signal is selected from hard decisions of both the MMSE detection result and unquantized signal candidates on the basis of the log likelihood function. For reducing the complexity of this process, the proposed algorithm decreases the number of calculations of the log likelihood functions for the quantized signal candidates. Computer simulations under a correlated MIMO channel condition demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides an excellent trade-off between BER performance and complexity, and that it is superior to conventional one-dimensional search algorithms in BER performance while requiring less complexity than the conventional algorithms.

Antipodal Fermi antenna (APFA) that uses an antipodal feeding section is proposed and its fundamental characteristics are presented. It is shown that the cross polarization level is decreased by 5–10 dB by the presence of the corrugation. It is also found that high gain, low VSWR and low side lobes and low back lobes are obtained. The mechanism of operation principles is discussed by using FDTD analysis. It is found that the corrugation transforms the current of parallel line mode to the current of traveling wave radiation mode and the effective aperture is enlarged which yields high gain characteristics.

In this paper a third-order inter-modulation cancellation technique using Pre-Post-Distortion is proposed to design a wideband high linear low-power LNA in deep submicron. The IM3 cancellation is achieved by post-distorting signal inversely after it is pre- distorted in the input trans-conductance stage during amplification process. The operating frequency range of the LNA is 800 MHz–5 GHz. The proposed technique increases input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) and input 1 dB Compression point (P-1 dB) to 12–25 dBm and -1.18 dBm, respectively. Post layout simulation results show a noise figure (NF) of 4.1–4.5 dB, gain of 13.7–13.9 dB and S11 lower than -13 dB while consumes 8 mA from 1.2 V supply. The LNA is designed in a 65 nm standard CMOS technology. The layout schematic shows that the LNA occupies 0.150.11 mm2 of silicon area.

We present a new multi-path routing methodology, MLB-routing, that is based on the multinomial logit model, which is well known in the random utility field. The key concept of the study is to set multiple paths from the origin to the destination, and distribute packets in accordance with multinomial logit type probability. Since MLB-routing is pure multi-path routing, it reduces the convergence on some links and increases bandwidth utilization in the network. Unlike existing multi-path routing schemes, which pre-set alternate paths, the proposed method can dynamically distribute packets to every possible path and thus is more efficient. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that this methodology can be implemented as either a link-state protocol or a distance-vector protocol. Therefore, it well supports the existing Internet. Simulations show that this methodology raises network utilization and significantly reduces end-to-end delay and jitter.

In this letter, we propose a new construction of quaternary low correlation zone (LCZ) sequence set using binary LCZ sequence sets and an inverse Gray mapping. The new construction method provides optimal quaternary LCZ sequence sets even if the employed binary LCZ sequence set is suboptimal. The optimality is improved at the price of alphabet extension.

In this letter, a study on the end-to-end outage performance of dual-hop non-regenerative relaying in the presence of co-channel interference is presented. We assume that both the desired and the interfering signals are subjected to Nakagami-m fading. Exact analytical expressions, as well as tight lower bounds of the end-to-end outage probability, are derived. An asymptotic expression for the outage probability at high values of Signal-to-Interference Ratio is also presented. Furthermore, we also propose the optimal power allocation for high values of Signal-to-Interference Ratio. Extensive numerically evaluation and computer simulation results are presented to verify the validity and the accuracy of the proposed analysis.

A compact antenna capable of generating two wide operating bands to cover the GSM850/900 (824–960 MHz) and GSM1800/1900/UMTS (1710–2170 MHz) systems is presented. The antenna occupies just 81.5(L)7(W)0.5(H) mm3 on the top edge of the supporting metal frame of the display panel, and is therefore easily embedded in the ultra-thin laptop computers as an internal antenna. The antenna is implemented using a ceramic substrate and consists of multi-branch strips. Based on the principle of the inverted-F antenna, our design yields two operating bands covering 816–983 MHz and 1703–2196 MHz can be achieved with good radiation performance for our design. The proposed antenna is thus suitable to be installed in the ultra-thin laptop computers for Wireless Wide Area Network applications.

In this letter, we derive another exact bit error rate (BER) for decode-and-forward (DF) relay systems over Rayleigh fading channels. At first, our focus is on fixed-DF (FDF) relay schemes in which the probability density function (PDF) is derived based on error-events at relay nodes. Some insight into how erroneous detection and transmission at relay nodes affect both the combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the averaged BER is obtained, and cooperative diversity is observed from the closed-form BER expression. In addition, the developed analytical method is extended to adaptive-DF (ADF) schemes and the exact BER expressions are derived. Simulation results are finally presented to validate the analysis.