The objective of this paper is to study the relationship between a visual stimulus and the amplitude and phase of the alpha wave as a first step to investigating a change in the background wave after a sensory stimulus and an evoked potential. We examined the effect of a single visual stimulus on the amplitude and phase of alpha waves using the complex demodulation method. The visual stimuli were generated by an LED mounted in goggles with the eyes-closed condition. The amplitude of the alpha wave decreased gradually after the stimulus, until it reached a minimum at around 300 ms after the stimulus. The alpha wave continued to increase, showing some rebound, and returning again to the pre-stimulus level. The phase variation after the stimulus tends to be considerably larger than that before the stimulus. Moreover, the average phase returned to the same slope as the pre-stimulus by 2550 ms after the stimulus. The visual stimulus has an effect on the alpha wave until about 2500 ms after the stimulus. The phase variation difference before and after stimulus is significant from 112 ms to 678 ms after the stimulus. This finding suggests there is a partially pararell time course between the change in VEPs plus ERP complex and the alpha wave.

The adaptive cross-spectral (ACS) technique recently introduced by Okuno et al. provides an attractive solution to acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) as it does not require double-talk (DT) detection. In this paper, we first introduce a generalized ACS (GACS) technique where a step-size parameter is used to control the magnitude of the incremental correction applied to the coefficient vector of the adaptive filter. Based on the study of the effects of the step-size on the GACS convergence behaviour, a new variable step-size ACS (VSS-ACS) algorithm is proposed, where the value of the step-size is commanded dynamically by a special finite state machine. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm has a new adaptation scheme to improve the initial convergence rate when the network connection is created. Experimental results show that the new VSS-ACS algorithm outperforms the original ACS in terms of a higher acoustic echo attenuation during DT periods and faster convergence rate.

It is expected that per-user customized services are widely used in next generation Personal Communication Network. To provide personalized services for each call, per-user service profiles are frequently referenced, so efficient service profile management is essentially required. To provide service profile based services, typically two schemes can be employed: One is Intelligent Network based Central scheme and the other is IMT-2000 based full replication scheme, we refer to as Follow-Me Replication Unconditional (FMRU). Since the Central scheme only depends on the service call rate and the FMRU is merely dependent on the movement rate, it is apparent that the FMRU scheme outperforms the Central scheme if the call-to-mobility ratio (CMR) is large, and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a new service profile replication schemes, Adaptive Follow-Me Replication Conditional (AFMRC) that determine replication automatically according to the user's varying CMR in real-time. We compared the performance of the AFMRC with the previous non-adaptive Follow-Me Replication Conditional (FMRC) scheme. Performance results indicate that as the CMR of a user changes, AFMRC adapts well compared to the existing schemes.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an efficient learning method for solving problems that learning agents have no knowledge about the environment a priori. Ant Colony System (ACS) provides an indirect communication method among cooperating agents, which is an efficient method for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Based on the cooperating method of the indirect communication in ACS and the update policy of reinforcement values in RL, this paper proposes the Q-ACS multiagent cooperating learning method that can be applied to both Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and combinatorial optimization problems. The advantage of the Q-ACS method is for the learning agents to share episodes beneficial to the exploitation of the accumulated knowledge and utilize the learned reinforcement values efficiently. Further, taking the visited times into account, this paper proposes the T-ACS multiagent learning method. The merit of the T-ACS method is that the learning agents share better policies beneficial to the exploration during agent's learning processes. Meanwhile, considering the Q-ACS and the T-ACS as homogeneous multiagent learning methods, in the light of indirect media communication among heterogeneous multiagent, this paper presents a heterogeneous multiagent RL method, the D-ACS that composites the learning policy of the Q-ACS and the T-ACS, and takes different updating policies of reinforcement values. The agents in our methods are given a simply cooperating way exchanging information in the form of reinforcement values updated in the common model of all agents. Owning the advantages of exploring the unknown environment actively and exploiting learned knowledge effectively, the proposed methods are able to solve both problems with MDPs and combinatorial optimization problems effectively. The results of experiments on hunter game and traveling salesman problem demonstrate that our methods perform competitively with representative methods on each domain respectively.

The propagator method (PM) belongs to a class of subspace based methods for direction-of-arrival estimation which only requires linear operations but does not involve any eigendecomposition or singular value decomposition as in common subspace techniques. In this paper, we apply the PM for estimating the frequencies of multiple real sinusoids in noise and a computationally simple as well as high resolution multiple frequency estimation algorithm is developed. The estimation accuracy of the proposed method is contrasted with the conventional MUSIC and Cramer-Rao lower bound under different noise conditions.

As the capacity of a personal computer and workstation increases rapidly, many electromagnetic simulators solving antenna problems are widely used. In this paper, the IE3D, FIDELITY and HFSS electromagnetic simulators, which are commercial software products, are applied to the analysis of built-in antennas for handsets in the vicinity of the human body. The IE3D, FIDELITY and HFSS electromagnetic simulators are based on the methods of moment, FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) and FEM (Finite Element Method), respectively. Firstly, basic characteristics including the human body's effect of a popular built-in antenna for handset such as PIFA (Planar Inverted-F Antenna) are obtained by the IE3D, FIDELITY and HFSS electromagnetic simulators, and calculated results are compared with measured results. Secondly, on the basis of newly considered design concepts for a handset antenna, a folded loop antenna for handset, which we have proposed in order to reduce the influence of the human body, is taken as an example of a balance-fed antenna and is analyzed theoretically and experimentally including the influence of the human body. In a result, calculated results by these three kinds of electromagnetic simulators are in good agreement with measured results and it is confirmed that these simulators are very effective in analyzing the handset antenna in the vicinity of the human body.

Various network resources, including wireless access services and multimedia appliances (device) are expected to be available in ubiquitous computing environments. Since resource availability can change when a user migrates from one place to another, functions to monitor the availability of resources in use and, if necessary, switch from obsolete resources to new ones are necessary for continuous service provision. This paper proposes adaptive terminal middleware called AMID that performs policy-based dynamic resource selection and host-based session management to ease network administrative tasks, and hide session failures and resource changes from applications and a user. AMID supports two kinds of mobility; session maintenance on vertical handoff and device handoff (service mobility). By AMID, a mobile host keeps entire handoff control and session state to eliminate the need for network-layer or intermediate-node mobility support, and mitigate responsibility of devices for session management. AMID realizes a Reliable Virtual Socket (RVS), on top of real sockets, which employs a seamless session handoff mechanism for resource changes, and a reliable session resume mechanism against unplanned disconnection of a wireless link. It achieves seamless session handoff through a proactive soft handoff method; to conceal setup and signaling latency, it initiates setup procedures with neighbor resources in advance of actual handoff and utilizes multiple wireless interfaces and devices redundantly. We implemented AMID and a follow-me audio application on top of it to evaluate the performance. Redirection of audio streams from built-in speakers to external ones, and handoff between 802.11b and Cellular are autonomously performed when a user migrates in the house. We confirmed that AMID achieved reliable session maintenance against wireless link failure, concealed latency of handoff management, and prevented packet loss during handoff.

A tree 3-spanner T of a graph G is a spanning tree of G such that the distance between any two vertices in T is at most 3 times of their distance in G. Madanlal et al. have presented an O(n + m) time algorithm for finding a tree 3-spanner of a permutation graph. However, the complexity of their algorithm is not optimal, and their algorithm can not be easily parallelized. In this paper, we will propose an improved algorithm to solve the same problem in O(n) time. Moreover, our algorithm can be easily parallelized so that a tree 3-spanner of a permutation graph can be found in O(log n) time with processors on the EREW PRAM computational model.

In the virtual home environment (VHE), which was proposed to offer global roaming and personal service environment portability, user's profiles and service logics are conveyed from home network to visited network to provide services at the visited network. Because user's profiles and service logics may contain confidential information, some procedures for mutual authentication among entities for offering confidence are needed. For these issues, we propose and analyze 3 party mutual authentication protocols adaptable to the VHE in 3G.

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 this letter, we propose the Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems to improve the error rate performance of OFDM. We also evaluate the iterative decoding performance on both an AWGN and a frequency-selective fading channels. We show that when the energy per information bit to the noise power spectral density ratio Eb/N0 is not small, the LDPC coded OFDM (LDPC-COFDM) systems have the good error rate performance with a small number of iterations. We also show that when the Eb/N0 is small, the BER of the LDPC-COFDM systems is worse than that of the Turbo coded OFDM (TCOFDM) systems, while when the Eb/N0 is not small, the BER of the LDPC-COFDM systems is better with a small number of iterations.

We have developed a three-dimensional eye movement simulator that simulates eye movement. The simulator allows us to extract the instantaneous eye movement rotation axes from clinical data sequences. It calculates the plane formed by rotation axes and displays it on an eyeball with rotation axes. It also extracts the innervations for eye muscles. The developed simulator is mainly programmed by a CG programming language, OpenGL. First, the simulator was applied to saccadic eye movement data in order to show the so-called Listing's plane on which all hypothetical rotation axes lie. Next, it was applied to clinical data sequences of two patients with benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). Instantaneous actual rotation axes and innervations for eye muscle extracted from data sequences have special characteristics. These results are useful for the elucidation of the mechanism of vestibular symptoms, particularly vertigo.

The channel noise in OFDM systems affects the accuracy of channel estimation, deteriorating the performance of equalization. We present a novel algorithm with MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error) channel estimation based on Hadamard Transform, to mitigate the effects of noise. The performance of the proposed algorithm is proved to be better than that with LS (Least Square) estimation, and very close to that with the MMSE estimation based on Fourier Transform, while the computation required is pretty small due to the use of Hadamard Transform.

We propose an effective method to localize a maneuvering mobile station by means of fixed base stations using the interacting multiple model (IMM) supporting the geometry-based localization algorithms. Representative performance analysis confirms that the proposed IMM solution significantly reduces location error and is better than that of Kalman filter implementation.

A bi-directional WDM transmission link that changes the channel-count assigned in each direction is proposed for efficiently accommodating IP traffic which is characterized by directional volume asymmetry. A novel bi-directional optical amplifier is also proposed for overcoming the problems that arise in realizing the proposed link. The asymmetric, bi-directional, repeatered WDM transmission of 8 (total) 10 Gbit/s, 50 GHz-spaced channels over eleven 50 km spans is successfully demonstrated. The experimental results clarify that, owing to the use of the proposed bi-directional amplifier, directional asymmetry in channel-count and Rayleigh backscattering do not result in any significant performance degradation. Based upon an analysis of backscattering induced impairment, we show that the total transmission loss of 1000 dB can be supported if the span loss is 20 dB.

In this paper, we describe the operation of circuits capable of more than 40-Gbit/s that we have developed using InP HEMT technology. For example, we succeeded in obtaining 43-Gbit/s operation for a full-rate 4:1Multiplier (MUX), 50-Gbit/s operation for a Demultiplexer (DEMUX), 50-Gbit/s operation for a D-type flip-flop (D-FF), and a preamplifier with a bandwidth of 40 GHz. In addition, the achievement of 90-Gbit/s operation for a 2:1MUX and a distributed amplifier with over 110-GHz bandwidth indicates that InP HEMT technology is promising for system operations of over 100 Gbit/s. To achieve these results, we also developed several design techniques to improve frequency response above 80 GHz including a symmetric and separated layout of differential elements in the basic SCFL gate and inverted microstrip.

In this letter, we show the effectiveness of a double-loop algorithm based on the concave-convex procedure (CCCP) in decoding linear codes. For this purpose, we numerically compare the error performance of CCCP-based decoding algorithm with that of a conventional iterative decoding algorithm based on belief propagation (BP). We also investigate computational complexity and its relation to the error performance.

We propose multibits/sequence-period optical code division multiple access (MS-OCDMA) systems with double optical hardlimiters (DHL) in the presence of APD noise, thermal noise, and channel interference. We apply Reed-Solomon (RS) codes to MS-OCDMA to further improve the error rate performance. We show that the MS-OCDMA receiver with DHL improves the bit error probability of MS-OCDMA systems when the received laser power is large. We also show that the performance of RS coded MS-OCDMA system is better than that of on-off keying OCDMA (OOK-OCDMA) system at the same bit rate and at the same chip rate, respectively.

Embedded processors are used in numerous devices executing dedicated applications. This setting makes it worthwhile to optimize the processor to the application it executes, in order to increase its power-efficiency. This paper proposes to enhance direct mapped data caches with automatically tuned randomized set index functions to achieve that goal. We show how randomization functions can be automatically generated and compare them to traditional set-associative caches in terms of performance and energy consumption. A 16 kB randomized direct mapped cache consumes 22% less energy than a 2-way set-associative cache, while it is less than 3% slower. When the randomization function is made configurable (i.e., it can be adapted to the program), the additional reduction of conflicts outweighs the added complexity of the hardware, provided there is a sufficient amount of conflict misses.

There has been a growing interest in multihop wireless ad hoc networks in recent years. Previous studies have shown that, in a wireless multihop network using the slotted ALOHA as the medium access control mechanism, the maximum throughput can be achieved if the number of neighbors is six to eight. We show that, when using the IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol in a wireless ad hoc network, the maximum end-to-end goodput is achieved when all nodes are within transmission range of each other. The main reason is that the channel spatial reuse factor gained from the multihop network does not match the increase in additional transmission hops that a packet needs to travel in a multihop network. For a multihop network, its MAC frame delivery capacity is approximately fixed at a value dependent on its spatial reuse factor. If the offered load increases, less capacity will be spent on delivering packets that eventually reach their destinations and hence resulting in lower end-to-end goodput.