Recently, many algorithms have been proposed for fast full search motion estimation. Among them, successive elimination algorithm (SEA) and its modified algorithms significantly speed up the performance of the full search algorithm. By introducing the inequality equation between the norm and the mean absolute difference (MAD) of two matching blocks, the SEA can successively eliminate invalid candidate blocks without any loss in estimation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a partial norm based early rejection algorithm (PNERA) for fast block motion estimation. The proposed algorithm employs the sum of partial norms from several subblocks of the block. Applying the sum of partial norms to the inequality equation, we can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the full search algorithm. In an attempt to reduce the computational load further, the modified algorithms using partial norm distortion elimination (PNDE) and subsampling methods are also proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is about 4 to 9 times faster than the original exhaustive full search, and is about 3 to 4 times faster than the SEA.

In this letter, we provide a solution to the stabilization problem of a class of Lipschitz nonlinear systems by output feedback. Via the newly proposed nonlinearity characterization function (NCF) concept, we propose an effective method in designing an output feedback controller. Under the suggested sufficient condition which is derived by using the NCF, the proposed control scheme achieves the global exponential stabilization.

This paper proposes a time alignment control (TAC) for reducing an influence of multiple access interference (MAI) due to propagation delays (PDs) in uplink transmission from multiple mobile stations (MSs) to an access point (AP) for an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based mobile communication system. In addition, this paper presents our evaluation of the proposed TAC as applied to dynamic parameter control orthogonal frequency and time division multiple access (DPC-OF/TDMA) which has been suggested for use in new generation mobile communication system. This paper also proposes several formats for an activation slot (ACTS) in which the GIs are lengthened in order to avoid the MAI because the TAC cannot be performed yet in an initial registration of the MSs. Computer simulation elucidates that lengthening the GIs of data symbols in the ACTS adequately to compensate a maximum delay improves the transmission performance of the ACTS at the initial registration without PDs compensation. The simulation also elucidates that the proposed TAC is performed to reduce the influence of the MAI effectively and that updating the estimates of the PDs every certain period is needed to compensate the PDs accurately under high-mobility environment.

An intermediate frequency (IF) variable gain amplifier (VGA) with exponential gain control for a radio receiver is fabricated in 0.25-µm CMOS technology. The techniques to improve the bandwidth and to reduce temperature dependence of gain are described. The complete VGA is composed of two stages of linearized transconductance VGA and three stages of fixed gain amplifier (FGA). The complete VGA provides a continuous 10 dB to 76.5 dB gain control range, an IIP3 of -11.5 dBm and an NF of 15 dB at 40 MHz.

A new design concept for a common-mode signal suppression circuit for a balanced-type filter has been investigated. The degradation mechanism of the balance characteristics was studied. The degradation is caused by the common-mode signals combined with the differential-mode signals in the balanced terminals. The concept employed is the reduction of the common-mode signal using a common-mode signal suppression circuit, connected to the balanced terminals. A serial resonance circuit is formed, in which the common-mode signals are shorted to ground. The circuit was applied to the balanced-type Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) filter. The improvement in balance characteristics, without increasing in the insertion loss, was confirmed by experiments for Global System Mobile (GSM) applications.

We consider delivering interactive dramas. A viewer interacts with a contents provider by answering multiple-choice questions and the answers to these questions influence the plot of delivered story. All possible plots can be represented by a directed graph such that every plot corresponds to some path of the graph. A delivery should be controlled according to the directed graph such that each viewer's history of answered choices forms a path of the graph. On the other hand, because some character of a viewer is known to a contents provider from his history of choices, a viewer tries to prevent even a contents provider from linking choices made by him. In this paper, we introduce unlinkable delivery for an interactive drama and propose such a delivery system for interactive dramas that viewer's choices are unlinkable and delivery is controlled according to the directed graph.

Differential power analysis (DPA) might break implementations of elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) on memory constraint devices. Goubin proposed a variant of DPA using a point (0,y), which is not randomized in Jacobian coordinates or in an isomorphic class. This point often exists in standardized elliptic curves, and we have to care this attack. In this paper, we propose zero-value register attack as an extension of Goubin's attack. Note that even if a point has no zero-value coordinate, auxiliary registers might take zero value. We investigate these zero-value registers that cannot be randomized by the above randomization. Indeed, we have found several points P = (x,y) which cause the zero-value registers, e.g., (1) 3x2 + a = 0,(2) 5x4 + 2ax2 - 4bx + a2 = 0,(3) P is y-coordinate self-collision point, etc. We demonstrate the elliptic curves recommended in SECG that have these points. Interestingly, some conditions required for zero-value register attack depend on explicit implementation of addition formulae -- in order to resist this type of attacks, we have to care how to implement the addition formulae. Finally, we note that Goubin's attack and the proposed attack assume that a base point P can be chosen by attackers and a secret scalar d is fixed, so that they are not applicable to ECDSA.

In this paper, we consider a mobile system consisting of a single isolated circular cell with K independent users simultaneously sharing the channel using binary DS-CDMA to establish a full duplex channel with the base station. Both coherent and differential detection RAKE receivers with Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) techniques are considered. The performance of two uplink/downlink receivers in Nakagami wideband fading channel is studied. Our approach relies on the use of total instantaneous interference power calculations instead of the use of average power approximations. We analyzed and derived new exact formulae for bit error probabilities for the considered system, and presented a set of numerical results both for the exact formulae and Gaussian approximation. The performance comparisons suggest that the exact formulae provide superior performance to Gaussian approximation especially at low number of users and either high fading parameters of the desired user or low fading parameters of the MAIs.

One fundamental issue in multiagent reinforcement learning is how to deal with the limited local knowledge of an agent in order to achieve effective learning. In this paper, we argue that this issue can be more effectively solved if agents are equipped with a consistent global view. We achieve this by requiring agents to follow an interacting protocol. The properties of the protocol are derived and theoretically analyzed. A distributed protocol that satisfies these properties is presented. The experimental evaluations are conducted for a well-known test-case (i.e., pursuit game) in the context of two learning algorithms. The results show that the protocol is effective and the reinforcement learning algorithms using it perform much better.

In this paper, we propose an adaptive multistage fuzzy-based partial parallel interference cancellation (FB-PPIC) multiuser detector for multi-carrier direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) communication systems over frequency selective fading channels. The partial cancellation tries to reduce the cancellation error in parallel interference cancellation (PIC) schemes due to the wrong interference estimations in the early stages and thus outperforms the conventional PIC (CPIC) under the heavy load for MC-CDMA systems. Therefore, in this paper, the adaptive cancellation weights are inferred from a proposed multistage fuzzy inference system (FIS) to perform effective PPIC multiuser detection under time-varying frequency selective fading channels in MC-CDMA systems. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive four-stage FB-PPIC scheme outperforms both CPIC and constant weight PPIC (CW-PPIC) schemes, especially in near-far environments.

The Multi-Point Relay (MPR) of the Optimized Link State Routing protocol reduces the flooding overhead compared with classic flooding. To select MPR nodes, HELLO messages are used. In dense population environments, the overhead of HELLO messages is critical because the HELLO messages carry all adjacent node IDs in the classical manner. Consequently, wireless bandwidth is consumed for data communications. One solution for this problem is to compress HELLO messages using a differential technique. However, few, if any, studies have applied a differential technique to HELLO messages. We introduce the novel Differential HELLO technique to reduce the overhead of the HELLO messages. The Differential HELLO technique consists of two kinds of compression methods: Chronological Compression and Topological Compression. In addition, the inconsistency problems of the 1-hop node information in adjacent nodes caused by packet loss are discussed. As solutions to the inconsistency problems, No Compression Acknowledgement (NC-ACK) and HELLO Information Forecast (HIF) have been examined. Our simulation has taken the efficiency of the Differential HELLO technique into consideration. The HELLO message overhead was reduced to 29.1 IDs from 75.8 IDs using the Differential HELLO technique at a packet loss rate of 10-4 under random node arrangement. This result reveals that the Differential HELLO technique reduces the classic HELLO overhead by 38%. In environments with lower packet-loss rates, the Differential HELLO technique promises to offer even better performance.

We present two new parallel algorithms for extending the domain of a UOWHF. The first algorithm is complete binary tree based construction and has less key length expansion than Sarkar's construction which is the previously best known complete binary tree based construction. But only disadvantage is that here we need more key length expansion than that of Shoup's sequential algorithm. But it is not too large as in all practical situations we need just two more masks than Shoup's. Our second algorithm is based on non-complete l-ary tree and has the same optimal key length expansion as Shoup's which has the most efficient key length expansion known so far. Using the recent result, we can also prove that the key length expansion of this algorithm and Shoup's sequential algorithm are the minimum possible for any algorithms in a large class of "natural" domain extending algorithms. But its parallelizability performance is less efficient than complete tree based constructions. However if l is getting larger, then the parallelizability of the construction is also getting near to that of complete tree based constructions. We also give a sufficient condition for valid domain extension in sequential domain extension.

The partial projection filter gives optimal signal restoration in the presence of both the signal space and the observation space noises. In this paper, the filter has been characterized from the point of view of its signal restoration and noise suppression capabilities. The filter is shown to suppress the noise component in the restored signal while retaining the signal component, thus maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio. Further, a digital implementation of the filter is presented in matrix form in contrast to its original operator based derivation, for practical applications.

Latch-based circuits have advantages for timing and are widely used for high-speed custom circuits. ASIC design flows, however, are based on circuits with flip-flops. This paper describes a new timing optimization algorithm by replacing the flip-flops in high-end ASICs by latches without changing the functionality of the circuits. Timing is optimized by using a fixed-phase retiming minimizing the impact of clock skew and jitter. A formal equivalence verification method that assures the logical correctness of the latch-replaced circuits is also proposed. Experimental results show that the optimization algorithm decreases the delay of benchmark circuits by as much as 17%.

The problem of signal restoration in the presence of observation space noise has been tackled extensively. However, restoration of degraded signals in the presence of signal space noise leads to considerable complexity because it becomes difficult to distinguish between the original signal and the noise. In this paper, a partial projection filter has been devised for the restoration of signals degraded by both the signal space and the observation space noises. A closed form of the proposed filter has been derived and its performance has been verified experimentally.

Some plants have air purification ability. This purification ability of plants is considered a promising method for indoor air purification because of the low cost and high purification performance. Therefore, several studies have been carried out to investigate the relationship between the air purification ability of plants and environmental conditions. Nevertheless, the purification mechanism and process have not been clarified yet. In this paper, we investigated the air purification process in plants by bioelectrical potential analysis using linear and nonlinear analysis methods. First, we showed that two types of plants have a high air purification ability; Schefflera and Boston fern. Next, we measured AC bioelectrical potential during the purifying process of plants for pollutant gas. Then, we evaluated the power spectra of time series data of the bioelectrical potential. We found that the power spectra shifted to a lower level after gas injection over all frequencies. Thus, the higher power spectrum came from possible higher physiological activities of the plant. Finally, we introduced a nonlinear analysis method from the dynamical system theory. We transformed the time series data of the potential to a higher dimensional state space using a delay coordinate, which is often used in the field of nonlinear time series analysis. The results show that the orbits in the reconstructed state space have a large variation in gas injection. These experimental results suggest that the measurement of bioelectrical potential could become a useful method for evaluating the air purification ability of plants.

This letter develops a practical sectorized antenna array using center-fed half-wavelength dipole antennas that are parallel to and a distance in front of a large ground plane reflector. Each element in the array is designed to provide coverage to isolate each 120sector from adjacent sectors. We derive a closed-form expression for spatial correlation function that can be used as guides in evaluating the effects of array spatial correlation on diversity performance in sectorized cellular communications.

This paper presents an asynchronous data transfer scheme using 2-color 2-phase dual-rail encoding based on a differential operation and its circuit realization. The proposed encoding enables seamless asynchronous data transfer without inserting a spacer, because each logic value is represented by two kinds of codewords with dual-rail, called "color" data. Since the difference x-x between components of a codeword (x,x) becomes constant in every valid state, the data-arrival state can be detected by calculating the difference x-x. From the viewpoint of circuit implementation, during the state transition, since the dual-rail x and x are defined so as to transit differentially, the compatibility with a comparator using a differential amplifier becomes high, which results in reduction of the cycle time. It is evaluated using HSPICE simulation with a 0.18 µm CMOS technology that communication speed using the proposed dual-rail encoding becomes 1.4 times faster than that using conventional dual-rail encoding.

In this paper, we propose a partial erasure decoding scheme with erasure-decision threshold for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes and analyze its performance in frequency-hopped multiple-access communications. RS code is used to correct erasures and errors caused by other-user interference. Binary FSK is employed to transmit the channel symbol. The proposed decoder decides whether to erase the received RS code symbol based on the ersure decsion threshold. The approximated formula for optimal erasure decision threshold is derived in such a way that packet error probability can be minimized. Numerical results show that the employment of adaptive erasure decision threshold attains the higher normalized throughput in the areas of high channel traffic cases.

This paper discusses stability boundaries in an electric power system with dc transmission based on a differential-algebraic equation (DAE) system. The DAE system is derived to analyze transient stability of the ac/dc power system: the differential equation represents the dynamics of the generator and the dc transmission, and the algebraic equation the active and reactive power relationship between the ac system and the dc transmission. In this paper complete characterization of stability boundaries of stable equilibrium points in the DAE system is derived based on an energy function for the associated singularly perturbed (SP) system. The obtained result completely describes global structures of the stability boundaries in solution space of the DAE system. In addition the characterization is confirmed via several numerical results with a stability boundary.