This paper presents a new method to improve the resonant characteristics of a microstrip resonator. The improved characteristics have been achieved by inserting two dielectric rods between strip conductor and the ground plane. Dielectric rods to be inserted have higher relative permittivity than that of the substrate. Therefore, it is suitable to realize by Low-Temperature Cofired Ceramics (LTCC) technique. Several model of microstrip resonators employing the proposed method are analyzed by a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method, and their resonant characteristics are discussed. One of the advantages of the proposed method is that an attenuation pole (fl or fh) in each side of the fundamental resonant frequency (fr) and improved-spurious responses can be realized together by a capacitive-coupling tapped resonator loaded with dielectric rods. The proposed method is also effective to achieve sharp skirt characteristics and wide stopband of a direct-coupling tapped resonator which can be used either as a wideband lowpass filter or a band-elimination filter. Another interesting feature of the analyzed resonators is that about 60% reduction in resonator's length has been obtained compared to a basic half-wavelength (λ/2) microstrip resonator. Therefore, wide exploitation of the proposed method can be expected in the filter design based on the LTCC technique.

Scattering of the two dimensional electromagnetic waves is studied by the infinite sequences of zeros arising on the complex plane, which just correspond to the null points of the far field pattern given as a function of the azimuthal angle θ. The convergent sequences of zeros around the point of infinity are evaluated when the scattering objects are assumed to be N-polygonal cylinders. Every edge condition can be satisfied if the locations of zeros are determined appropriately. The parameters, which allow us to calculate the exact positions of zeros, are given by the asymptotic analysis. It is also shown that there are N-directions of convergence, which tend to infinity. An illustrative example is presented.

In this paper, we present Neighbor Community Finder (NCF, for short), a tool for finding Web communities related to given URLs. While existing link-based methods of finding communities, such as HITS, trawling, and Companion, use algorithms running on a Web graph whose vertices are pages and edges are links on the Web, NCF uses an algorithm running on an inter-site graph whose vertices are sites and edges are global-links (links between sites). Since the phrase "Web site" is used ambiguously in our daily life and has no unique definition, NCF uses directory-based sites proposed by the authors as a model of Web sites. NCF receives URLs interested in by a user and constructs an inter-site graph containing neighbor sites of the given URLs by using a method of identifying directory-based sites from URL and link data obtained from the actual Web on demand. By computational experiments, we show that NCF achieves higher quality than Google's "Similar Pages" service for finding pages related to given URLs corresponding to various topics selected from among the directories of Yahoo! Japan.

A new hybrid formulation has been derived for analyzing biological electromagnetic compatibility (Bio-EMC) problems by combining the frequency-domain Method of Moments (MoM) and the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method. This hybrid form is different from, and more direct than, the method previously proposed by Mangoud et al. Some numerical examples are given for the human head exposure field due to a half wavelength dipole and a one-wavelength loop antenna. Our iterative method is found to have fast convergence. In addition, our method works well for cases when the radiation antenna wires are not aligned with the FDTD lattice.

This paper introduces a new type of microwave isolator. The operation is based on the two phenomena; the ferrite edge-mode and the photo-generated plasma on silicon substrate. Conventional ferrite edge-mode isolator has been made of the ferrite and the resistive material. The later is used to absorb the reverse-propagating wave of the isolator. An inadequate choice of the resistive body leads to the imperfect absorption; the isolation ratio decreases. In this paper, the isolation-variable isolator is introduced by using this change of isolation. The control is realized by the change of the surface resistance on the silicon. On this isolator, the frequency response is investigated both experimentally and numerically. The numerical analysis is conducted by FDTD method. The experiment is carried out on the prototype isolator. Both experimental and numerical results have shown that the isolation ratio can be controlled for 39 dB at 12 GHz by the irradiation.

An empirical formula of resonant frequency of bow-tie microstrip antennas is presented, which is based on the cavity model of microstrip patch antennas. A procedure to design a bow-tie antenna using genetic algorithm (GA) in which we take the formula as a fitness function is also given. An optimized bow-tie antenna by genetic algorithm was constructed and measured. Numerical and experimental results are used to validate the formula and GA. The results are in good agreement.

A high permittivity LSE-NRD guide was applied to a planar antenna at 60 GHz. Emphasis was placed on compatibility between the high permittivity LSE-NRD guide and the conventionally used low permittivity LSM-NRD guide. Performance of the transition between two such types of NRD guides was optimized by using an electromagnetic simulator and the validity was experimentally demonstrated. A simple radiator, consisting of a tapered high permittivity LSE-NRD guide was fabricated and evaluated as to radiation characteristics. Since the radiator has a broad radiation pattern, it was employed in a primary radiator of a two-dimensional parabolic reflector to develop a new type of folded planar antenna at 60 GHz. This planar antenna has a double-layered structure. In the upper layer, a metalized dielectric substrate with a slotted array is excited by a rectangular-shaped oversized waveguide, and in the lower layer, an offset parabolic reflector is fed by the radiator. Measurement showed the half-power beam width of the fabricated antenna to be 2.5 degrees in the E and H planes, respectively, and the gain to be 35.3 dBi, thus indicating that a good pencil beam antenna was successfully developed in this manner.

In this article we propose a new framework to support QoS and 4G enabled mobility management. The key feature of this framework is twofold; the Policy based Handover control, and the adaptive handover mechanisms. On one hand, the adaptive handover mechanism will allow the selection of different handover schemes based on the user service level specification in order to differentiate the handover quality provided for the required service level, thus optimizing the network resources usage and providing the agreed service level to users. On the other hand, the proposed handover control mechanism considers resource availability and other constraints during the handover decision in order to provide support for QoS aware mobility on the contrary of the classical naïve mobility management that considers only signal strength fading. This decision mechanism will provide mainly the interaction between the mobility and QoS management frameworks but also a 4G handover control. In addition, the QoS aware handover will provide the knowledge necessary to achieve a proactive handover's procedures control.

Unlike most of the previous work for smart antennas that covered each area individually (antenna-array design, signal processing and communications algorithms and network throughput), this paper may be considered as a review of comprehensive effort on smart antennas that examines and integrates antenna array design, the development of signal processing algorithms (for angle of arrival estimation and adaptive beamforming), strategies for combating fading, and the impact on the network throughput. In particular, this study considers problems dealing with the impact of the antenna design on the network throughput. In addition, fading channels and tradeoffs between diversity combining and adaptive beamforming are examined as well as channel coding to improve the system performance.

In order to achieve a transponder antenna for intersection collision avoidance systems in Intelligent Transport Systems, a lens horn antenna that generates a cosecant squared beam is developed. This paper clarifies the method for designing the antenna to achieve accurate radiation pattern synthesis. A H-plane sectral horn is selected. The ray tracing method is employed in the design of the lens shape. The aperture of the horn is determined to be seven wavelengths based on a comparison of calculated radiation patterns and the desired cosecant squared beam shape. Accurate electrical performance, such as radiation patterns and electrical fields in the horn, is calculated using Finite Difference Time Domain software. Electrical field disturbances caused by reflected waves at the lens surfaces expanded widely inside the small horn. As a result, sidelobe levels of the radiation patterns are increased. In order to eliminate these disturbances, matching layers are attached to the shaped lens surface. Then, electrical field distributions in the horn are recovered and disturbances disappear. Measured radiation patterns become almost the same as that designed using the ray tracing method. The results show that application of the ray tracing method to radiation pattern synthesis of a small lens horn antenna is effective. We clarify the electrical field disturbances caused by reflections at the lens surfaces and show that eliminating the reflection at the lens surface by attaching matching layers is very important to achieving radiation pattern synthesis.

In this letter, we show the effects of the chip waveform selection on the detection performance of the energy detector in DS/SS communications. Three chip waveforms such as rectangular, half-sine and raised-cosine are examined as the DS/SS chip waveform. It is demonstrated that the partial-band detection can enhance the detection performance of the energy detector approximately 50-70% compared with the full-band detection. When the chip rate is identical, the raised-cosine waveform shows lower detection probability due to its wider spreading bandwidth. However, when the spreading bandwidth is identical, the rectangular waveform shows lower detection probability due to its lower partial-band energy factor.

An image NRD guide-fed dielectric rod antenna, which is suitable for use at millimeter-wave frequencies, is presented in this paper. The antenna is composed of a linearly tapered dielectric rod connected to the image NRD guide. First, radiation characteristics of the dielectric rod antenna directly protruded from the end of the image NRD guide are investigated by FDTD analysis and measurements at 30 GHz band. For this case, the degradation of the radiation pattern and the decrease of the gain, which are due to the strong radiation from the guide-to-antenna discontinuity, are observed. In order to minimize this radiation and to realize reasonable radiation characteristics, a transition from the image NRD guide-to-rod antenna is proposed. A simple procedure to determine the optimum dimensions of the transition is described. This procedure is based on parametric study of the transition's dimensions, and is performed using FDTD analysis. Based on the results, the dielectric rod antenna having a length of 10 λ0 is designed, and its performance is analyzed and measured. The results show that radiation patterns with the half power beamwidth of 22, sidelobe level of -21 dB and reasonable gain of 18.5 dBi can be realized by employing the transition having the optimum dimensions.

An output load VSWR (voltage standing wave ratio) protection circuit for SiGe power amplifiers (PA) is presented by using the relatively low collector-emitter avalanche breakdown characteristic of SiGe HBT. Unlike the conventional diode-type switch, the new protection circuit completely eliminates the undesirable dc leakage current during the normal operation of the PA. Simulations and measurements show the proposed protection circuit enhances the ruggedness of the PA at harsh operating condition while it imposes only minor performance degradation at normal operating condition.

In this study, a CG animation tool was designed that allows interpolation and extrapolation of two types of repeated motions including finger actions, for quantitative analyses of the relationship between features of human motions and subjective impressions. Three-dimensional human motions are measured with a magnetic motion capture and a pair of data gloves, and then relatively accurate time-series joint data are generated utilizing statistical characteristics. Based on the data thus obtained, time-series angular data of each joint for two dancing motions is transformed into frequency domain by Fourier transform, and spectral shape of each dancing action is interpolated. The interpolation and extrapolation of two motions can be synthesized with simple manner by changing an weight parameter while keeping good harmony of actions. Using this CG animation tool as a motion synthesizer, repeated human motions such as a dancing action that gives particular impressions on the observers can be quantitatively measured and analyzed by the synthesis of actions.

From the bifurcation viewpoint, this study examines a boost PFC converter with average-current-mode control. The boost PFC converter is considered to be a nonlinear circuit because of its use of a multiplier and its large duty cycle variation for input current control. However, most previous studies have implemented linear analysis, which ignores the effects of nonlinearity. Therefore, those studies were unable to detect instability phenomena. Nonlinearity produces bifurcations and chaos when circuit parameters change. The classical PFC design is based on a stable periodic orbit that has desired characteristics. This paper describes the main bifurcations that this orbit may undergo when the parameters of the circuit change. In addition, the instability regions in the PFC converter are delimited. That fact is of practical interest for the design process. Moreover, a prototype PFC circuit is introduced to examine these instability phenomena experimentally. Then, a special numerical program is developed. Bifurcation maps are provided based on this numerical study. They give a comprehensive outstanding for stability conditions and identify stable regions in the parameter space. Moreover, these maps indicate PFC converter dynamics, power factors, and regulation. Finally, numerical analyses and experimentation show good agreement.

We present mutually pulse-coupled two relaxation oscillators having refractoriness. The system can be implemented by a simple electrical circuit, and various periodic synchronization phenomena can be observed experimentally. The phenomena are characterized by a ratio of phase locking. Using a return map having a trapping window, the ratio can be analyzed in a parameter subspace rigorously. We then clarify effects of the refractoriness on the pulse coding ability of the system.

Integrated implementation of RF front-end components has been shown to posses many benefits. Furthermore, it presents a new way of approaching RF design. This paper will discuss the recent developments by the author's group in the field of RF front-end technology. This will include stand-alone RF front-end components such as a self-heterodyne mixer as well as more functional front-end circuitry such as digital beamformer arrays, retrodirective arrays and an array error calibration scheme.

In this paper, we examine the effect of random steering errors on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) at the output of the recently addressed wavelet-based generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC). This new beamformer employs a set of P-regular M-band wavelet bases for the design of the blocking matrix of the GSC. We first carry out a general expression of the output SINR of the GSC with multiple interferers present. With this expression, we then examine the analysis of wavelet-based GSC by expressing the SINR in terms of parameters such as the regularity of wavelet filters, the number of bands of wavelet filters, the length of adaptive weights, and the input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Some simulation results verify the analytically predicted performance.

We describe elements of a fast integral equation solver for large periodic and partly periodic finite array systems. A key element of the algorithm is utilization (in a rigorous way) of a block-Toeplitz structure of the impedance matrix in conjunction with either conventional Method of Moments (MoM), Fast Multipole Method (FMM), or Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based Adaptive Integral Method (AIM) compression techniques. We refer to the resulting algorithms as the (block-)Toeplitz-MoM, (block-)Toeplitz-AIM, or (block-)Toeplitz-FMM algorithms. While the computational complexity of the Toeplitz-AIM and Toeplitz-FMM algorithms is comparable to that of their non-Toeplitz counterparts, they offer a very significant (about two orders of magnitude for problems of the order of five million unknowns) storage reduction. In particular, our comparisons demonstrate, that the Toeplitz-AIM algorithm offers significant advantages in problems of practical interest involving arrays with complex antenna elements. This result follows from the more favorable scaling of the Toeplitz-AIM algorithm for arrays characterized by large number of unknowns in a single array element and applicability of the AIM algorithm to problems requiring strongly sub-wavelength resolution.

A multimode horn with both a low cross-polarization component less than -30 dB and good VSWR characteristics has been realized at frequency bands 8.6-9.8 GHz and 10.75-11.15 GHz. The improved performance of the proposed horn is verified by comparing with the previous dual-band double-flared horn. The design method for such a horn is based on the mode-matching approach combined with the optimization procedure. This paper proposes an objective function taking account of a spill-over loss and a rotational symmetry in the radiated field instead of an ideal radiation pattern. The effectiveness of our horn is verified by comparison between experimental results in the X band and predicted ones.