In the 1960's, the problems of distributed systems management did not exist. Systems were centralized and typically housed in one facility. Over time, however, the power, complexity and connectivity of the computer systems and networks evolved. Today, businesses are dependent on their compute and networking infrastructures to operate and survive. These infrastructures are geographically and functionally distributed, and their management is critical. This paper discusses how distributed systems management has evolved, and what the future may bring.

We propose and demonstrate a directly modulated AM-VSB CATV system employing split-band and optical vestigial sideband (VSB) modulation techniques. Systems' performance can be improved by using optical VSB modulation and split-band techniques simultaneously. Our proposed directly modulated transmission system is simpler and more cost-effective than conventional externally modulated transmission system because of external modulator and complicated stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS)-suppression method are not required.

This paper presents measurement and analysis of various networks and applications using a high-speed IP meter. The authors have developed a high-speed IP meter with a GPS timestamp component, which enables precise measurement of packet delay and jitter in various networks. Measurement of the following networks was performed, 1) Measurement of traffic in a commercial IPv6 access service on ADSL, as a typical broadband access service network. 2) Measurement of traffic in the 54th IETF meeting in Yokohama, as a typical high-speed Internet backbone network. This paper reports the characteristics identified in these networks, e.g. asymmetricities of one-way packet delay over an ADSL access network and the difference in TCP/UDP packet delay over a high-speed backbone network. It also presents the analysis results of some multimedia applications in the Internet, and discusses the quality of service on Internet access service networks.

A special group of voice application services (VASs) are promising contents for wireless as well as wireline networks. Without a designated call admission policy, VAS calls are expected to suffer from relatively high probability of blocking since they normally require better signal quality than ordinary voice calls. In this letter, we consider a prioritized call admission design in order to reduce the blocking probability of VAS calls, which makes the users feel the newly-provided VAS in belief. The VAS calls are given a priority by reserving a number of channel-processing hardwares. With the reservation, the blocking probability of prioritized VAS calls can be evidently reduced. That of ordinary calls, however, is increasing instead. This letter provides a system model that counts the blocking probabilities of VAS and ordinary calls simultaneously, and numerically examines an adequate level of the prioritization for VAS calls.

This letter presents a lower bound and approximation for the coverage probability of the pilot channel that can be used for a CDMA downlink design. The approximation of a compound truncated Poisson distribution is used to obtain a closed form equation for the coverage probability of the pilot channel. Computer simulations show that our lower bound curve is truly less than the empirical curve, and our proposed approximation agrees well with the empirical result.

The performance of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is related to the efficiency of the routing protocol in adapting to changes in the network topology and the link status. However, the use of many different mobility models without a unified quantitative "measure" of the mobility has made it very difficult to compare the results of independent performance studies of routing protocols. In this paper, a mobility measure for MANETs is proposed that is flexible and consistent. It is flexible because one can customize the definition of mobility using a remoteness function. It is consistent because it has a linear relationship with the rate at which links are established or broken for a wide range of network scenarios. This consistency is the strength of the proposed mobility measure because the mobility measure reliably represents the link change rate regardless of network scenarios.

This paper proposes a simulation framework suitable for holonic manufacturing systems, or HMS, based on the concept of distributed self-simulation. HMS is a distributed system that comprises autonomous and cooperative elements called holons, for the flexible and agile manufacturing. The simulation framework proposed here capitalizes on this distributed nature, where each holon functions similar to an independent simulator with self-simulation capabilities to maintain its own clock, handle events, and detect inter-holon state inconsistencies and perform rollback actions. This paper discusses the detailed architecture and design issues of such a simulator and reports on the results of a prototype.

We developed a process to fabricate optical functions such as, lens, prism, or diffuser directly on to a glass substrate. Processes include precision mastering by diamond cutting, and multi-layer photopolymer (2P) molding process to realize flat surface and integration of multiple functions with a good alignment within few micrometers.

This letter proposes a novel technique for evaluating the longitudinal distribution of the Raman gain characteristics in optical fibers connected to a reference optical fiber with a known Raman gain efficiency. This technique can evaluate the Raman gain efficiency in test fibers using a simplified experimental setup. We performed experiments on various test fibers and confirmed that their Raman gain efficiency can be obtained easily and accurately by employing a reference fiber.

Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMSs), in which decisions are made through cooperation among holons (autonomous and cooperative manufacturing entities), eliminate various bottlenecks that exist in conventional systems to adapt to high-variety low-volume production. This paper describes the architecture of HMSs. Issues regarding incremental development and dynamic reconfiguration of cooperation mechanisms themselves, and mechanisms for ensuring stable and safe behaviors of HMSs are also discussed with reference to several proposals, with a view to applying the HMS architecture to large and complicated applications.

We propose a method of IP traffic management where the TCP performance at a bottleneck link is estimated from monitored data about the behavior of the number of active flows versus link utilization, which are both easy to measure. This method is based on our findings that (i) TCP performance remains constant as long as the link utilization is below some threshold value, but becomes degraded when it exceeds this value and (ii) the number of active flows increases linearly with link utilization up to the same value, and the increase becomes nonlinear above it. Though this threshold may vary depending on traffic/network conditions, our method requires neither predetermination of a threshold on the basis of assumed traffic conditions nor direct measurement of TCP performance.

In this paper, a non-adaptive optimal transform (NAOT) coding system is proposed. Note that the energy-invariant property in an orthogonal transformation and that the mean squared error (MSE) of a reconstructed image is proportional to the total energy of transform coefficients discarded in the coding process. The NAOT coding system is developed and proved optimal in the sense of minimum average energy loss. Basically, the proposed coding system consists of the following steps. First, obtain the average energy image block from transform image blocks. Second, sort the average energy image block in the descending order by energy where the sorted indices are recorded. Third, specify the number of coefficients, M, to be retained in the coding process. Fourth, the first M sorted indices form a set denoted as SM through which the problem of optimal feature selection in transform coding is solved. Fifth, find a fixed mask AM from set SM which is then used to select M significant transform coefficients in image blocks. Finally, the M selected coefficients are quantized and coded by the order as in SM. To verify the NAOT coding system, simulations are performed on several examples. In the simulation, the optimality and the optimal feature selection in the NAOT coding system are justified. Also, the effectiveness of the proposed SM-based selection approach is compared with the zigzag scan used in the JPEG. For fair comparison, the JPEG is modified to code only M transform coefficients. Simulation results indicate that the performance of SM-based selection approach is superior or identical to the zigzag scan in terms of PSNR. Finally, the performance comparison between the NAOT coding system and the JPEG is made. It suggests that the proposed NAOT coding system is able to trade very little PSNR for significant bit rate reduction when compared with the JPEG. Or it can be said that the JPEG wastes much bit rate to improve very little PSNR on the reconstructed image, when compared with the NAOT coding system.

Aging is progressing in our country. Cerebral disease poses a serious problem. Viewing this problem objectively, we can say that support of aging and cerebral disease patients is a useful research theme. To the present, we have done rank evaluation of cerebral disease using synthetic face picture images. This study assesses cognitive ability and expression control ability for intoxication, which is known to impair thinking, cognition, and memory ability. We also examine correspondence of intoxication to cerebral disease. Measurement of cognitive ability corresponds to observation of an internal condition; the measurement of expression control ability corresponds to observation of an external condition. In measurement of cognitive ability, we simulated early stage symptoms of vascular dementia in the second stage of BAC. Also, decreased cognitive ability occurs from the first stage of BAC on face recognition to figure and language. Moreover, face test results show significant difference between decrease in the first stage of BAC and one in the second stage of BAC. These results indicate the possibility of rank evaluation and early stage detection of vascular dementia using a face picture image. From measurement of expression control ability, we obtained the result that we can judge whether a subject has reached second stage of BAC by observing an expression's strength of smile. The second stage of BAC shows symptoms similar to those of vascular dementia. We found the possibility that smile is valid as one externally-observable index for detection of cerebral disease.

This article describes a new method for converting an arbitrary topology mesh into one having subdivision connectivity. First, a base mesh is produced by applying a sequence of edge collapse operations to the original mesh with irregular connectivity. Then, the base mesh is iteratively subdivided. Each subdivided mesh is optimized to reduce its distance from the original mesh and to improve its global smoothness and compactness. A set of corresponding point pairs, which is required to compute the distance from the original mesh to the subdivided mesh, is determined by combining the initial parameterization and the multi-resolution projection. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields good performance in terms of global smoothness, small distortion, and good compactness, compared with conventional methods.

In this paper, an efficient optimization algorithm for solving the inverse problem of a two-dimensional lossless homogeneous dielectric object is investigated. A lossless homogeneous dielectric cylinder of unknown permittivity scatters the incident wave in free space and the scattered fields are recorded. Based on the boundary condition and the incident field, a set of nonlinear surface integral equation is derived. The imaging problem is reformulated into optimization problem and the steady-state genetic algorithm is employed to reconstruct the shape and the dielectric constant of the object. Numerical results show that the permittivity of the cylinders can be successfully reconstructed even when the permittivity is fairly large. The effect of random noise on imaging reconstruction is also investigated.

We have obtained high performance and low voltage driving OCB panel by reducing the critical voltage and retardation matching between liquid crystal layer and compensation films. Flattening color filter layer and optimizing rubbing process have minimized the critical voltage in the panel. In addition, an appropriate retardation of the film and LC layer has scanned to achieve low driving voltage and high transmission. Especially, by adopting new driving scheme, we considerably reduced the initial bend transition time, which is known as one of drawbacks in OCB mode. As a result, we developed the proto-type 17" WXGA OCB panel with less than 5 V drive, over 90% of TN light efficiency and over 80 degree for all viewing direction except for rubbing direction including color shift as well as high-speed response time.

In speech enhancement with adaptive microphone array, the voice activity detection (VAD) is indispensable for the adaptation control. Even though many VAD methods have been proposed as a pre-processor for speech recognition and compression, they can hardly discriminate nonstationary interferences which frequently exist in real environment. In this research, we propose a novel VAD method with array signal processing in the wavelet domain. In that domain we can integrate the temporal, spectral and spatial information to achieve robust voice activity discriminability for a nonstationary interference arriving from close direction of speech. The signals acquired by microphone array are at first decomposed into appropriate subbands using wavelet packet to extract its temporal and spectral features. Then directionality check and direction estimation on each subbands are executed to do VAD with respect to the spatial information. Computer simulation results for sound data demonstrate that the proposed method keeps its discriminability even for the interference arriving from close direction of speech.

A mathematical expression for the received signal power in a severe frequency-selective fading channel is derived. Using the derived expression, the signal power distributions are obtained by Monte-Carlo simulation and compared with the Nakagami m-power distribution. It is found that the power distribution matches well with the Nakagami m-power distribution when the multipath channel has a uniform power delay profile.

To speed up on-line analytical processing (OLAP), data warehouse, which is usually derived from operational databases, is introduced. When the operational databases happen to change, the data warehouse gets stale. To maintain the freshness of data warehouse, operational database changes need to be frequently and concurrently propagated into the data warehouse. However, if several update transactions are allowed to execute concurrently without an appropriate concurrency control, data inconsistency between data warehouse and operational databases could arise due to incorrect propagation of changes on the operational databases into the data warehouse. In this paper, we propose a new concurrency control scheme, which could execute a number of update transactions in a consistent way. Whenever an update transaction tries to update a data that is being used by OLAP transactions, our scheme allows the update transaction to create a new version of the data. To investigate the applicable areas of our scheme, its performance is evaluated by means of simulation approach. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme enables OLAP transactions to continuously read a very fresh data without wasting a lot of time to find out an appropriate version of the data from the version pool.

Combining a layered space-time receiver with the OFDM for high-rate transmissions requires the multi-channel estimation process. So, this letter proposes a time-domain approach for new preamble structure in OFDM-based multiple antenna systems, and investigates the channel estimation performance based on the semi-blind processing and its imperfectness by using time-domain windowing. The proposed preamble can estimate the multi-channel up to the 8 transmit antennas in the WLAN standards using two long preambles.