We investigate the statistical features of both random- and chaos-based FM timing signals to ascertain their applicability to digital circuits and systems. To achieve such a goal, we consider both the case of single- and two-phase logic and characterize the random variable representing, respectively, the time lag between two subsequent rising edges or between two consecutive zero-crossing points of the modulated timing signal. In particular, we determine its probability density and compute its mean value and variance for cases which are relevant for reducing Electromagnetic emissions. Finally, we address the possible problems of performance degradation in a digital system driven by a modulated timing signal and to cope with this we give some guidelines for the proper choice of the statistical properties of the modulating signals.

Multicasting is an efficient communication tool for use in multi-point applications such as conferencing and information distribution. In ad hoc networks, node mobility causes frequent changes of network topology, and re-construction of the multicast tree in an efficient and effective manner becomes a critical issues. In case of link breakage, most of the multicast tree construction protocols available presently require either a total re-build of the tree or to reconnect a disjoined node back to the multicast tree via the shortest path which may disrupt the optimising factors, such as energy consumption, delay or cost, used in the building of the original tree. In this paper, we introduce a computationally efficient recovery algorithm which will also minimise the power consumption on the tree.

A fast winner search method for VQ based on 2-pixel-merging sum pyramid is proposed in order to reject a codeword at an earlier stage to reduce the computational burden. The necessary search scope of promising codewords is meanwhile narrowed by using sorted real sums. The high search efficiency is confirmed by experimental results.

A series of micromagnetic models including simulations of the 3D thin film write head field, the GMR read head, the thin film media and channel codes are utilized to study the recording performance in longitudinal hard disk drives (HDD) at extremely high densities. The (0, 4/4) encoder is utilized to translate the user data into (0, 4/4) constrained codes, before the write process is performed. The write current is achieved from the constrained code in the NRZ format. The read back voltage is reshaped to the PR-IV signal and the Viterbi detector is utilized to recover the data. In a medium of 10 nm grains, the recording linear density limits with the PRML method are about 1000 kfci, which is 1.5 times of those with the PD channel.

In this paper, we propose a delayed feedback guaranteed cost controller design method for uncertain linear systems with delays in states. Based on the Lyapunov method, an LMI optimization problem is formulated to design a delayed feedback controller which minimizes the upper bound of a given quadratic cost function. Numerical examples show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Finding DC operating points of nonlinear circuits is an important and difficult task. The Newton-Raphson method adopted in the SPICE-like simulators often fails to converge to a solution. To overcome this convergence problem, homotopy methods have been studied from various viewpoints. For the global convergence of homotopy methods, it is a necessary condition that a given initial solution is the unique solution to the homotopy equation. According to the conventional criterion, such an initial solution, however, is restricted in some very narrow region. In this paper, considering the circuit interpretation of homotopy equations, we prove theorems on the uniqueness of an initial solution for globally convergent homotopy methods. These theorems give new criteria extending the region wherein any desired initial solution satisfies the uniqueness condition.

A framework is described for a peer-to-peer information exchange system, and a collaborative information retrieval (IR) scheme for the system is proposed. The aims of the system include smooth knowledge and information management to activate organizations or communities. Conventional server-centric systems are weak because they create information-providing bottlenecks. Accordingly, the proposed framework targets the collaborative inter-working of personal repositories that accumulate per-user information, and accept and service requests. Issues concerning the framework are addressed. One issue is the retrieval of information from another's personal repository; the retrieval criteria of a system are tightly personalized for its user. The system is assumed to employ a vector space model with a concept-base as its IR mechanism. The vector space on one system is very different from that on another system. Another issue is the automated control of the information-providing criteria. This paper presents solutions to the first problem. To achieve IR that provides satisfactory results to a user requiring information from another's personal repository, we need vector space equalization to compensate for the differences in the vector spaces of the personal repositories. The paper presents a vector space equalization scheme, the automated relevance feedback scheme, that compensates the differences in the vector spaces of the personal repositories. We implement the scheme as a system and evaluate its performance using documents on the Internet.

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of pilot channel-aided channel estimation for multicarrier direct-sequence (DS) code division multiple access (CDMA) communication system as proposed by Kondo and Milstein . We consider a multicarrier DS-CDMA system with different number of pilot and data channels. We investigate the optimum number of pilot channels for various coherence bandwidths and different number of subchannels. Keeping the total transmit bandwidth fixed, an optimum number of total subchannels and pilot channels exists under specific channel environment and transmitted energy. As the number of pilot channels increases, more accurate channel estimation is possible but the number of data channels decreases resulting a smaller diversity gain. We show that there is a tradeoff between the number of pilot channels and data subchannels, thereby requiring differing numbers of optimum pilot channels according to channel conditions.

This paper investigates the use of chaotic pulsewidth modulation (CPWM) scheme for electronic ballasts to eliminate visible striations (appearance of black and white bands along the lamp tube) in fluorescent lamps. As striations can be eliminated by superimposing a small amount of dc current or low frequency ac current to the electrodes to produce composite current waveform through the lamp, the underlying principle of this work is based on the fact that the power spectral density of the lamp current will be rich of low-frequency harmonics at the output of inverters switching with CPWM. Most importantly, the lamp life will not be affected with chaotic switchings, because the lamp current crest factor is found to be similar to the one with standard pulsewidth modulation (PWM) and the lamp current does not have dc component. The effectiveness of eliminating striations is confirmed experimentally with a T8 36W prototype.

A reduced complexity multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) equalizer with ordered successive interference cancellation (OSIC) is proposed for combating intersymbol interference (ISI) and cochannel interference (CCI) over frequency-selective multipath channels. It is developed as a reduced-rank realization of the conventional MMSE decision feedback equalizer (DFE). In particular, the MMSE weight vectors at each stage of OSIC are computed based on the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) technique and reduced-rank processing is incorporated by using the conjugate gradient (CG) algorithm for reduced complexity implementation. The CG algorithm leads to a best low-rank representation of the GSC blocking matrix via an iterative procedure, which in turn gives a reduced-rank equalizer weight vector achieving the best compromise between ISI and CCI suppression. With the dominating interference successfully cancelled at each stage of OSIC, the number of iterations required for the convergence of the CG algorithm decreases accordingly for the desired signal. Computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed reduced-rank MIMO DFE can achieve nearly the same performance as the full-rank MIMO MMSE DFE with an effective rank much lower than the dimension of the signal-plus-interference subspace.

In wireless mobile environments, data requests based on the location of mobile clients (MCs) have increased. The requested data, called location-dependent data (LDD), may be uncertain if MCs use terms of general distance like "near". Fuzzy theory allows us to represent uncertainty without sharp boundaries. In this paper we quantify the fuzziness and propose a method for constructing the data region of LDD by the degree of the distance between LDDs' and MCs' locations. In simulation studies, we evaluate the LDD regions (LDRs) in various situations: MCs' extensive and intensive queried pattern in data regions of two "near" senses and civilized regions with regional features. Our performance evaluation shows that the number of database accesses in proposed LDRs can be reduced in each case.

A unified linear multiuser receiver that minimizes a weighted sum of the multiple access interference (MAI) and the background noise is introduced. The proposed receiver includes the three popular linear receivers, namely the matched-filter, the decorrelating and the minimum mean-square-error receivers as special cases. Furthermore, by tuning a single weighting factor, it is possible to improve the performance of the proposed receiver over that of any of the above mentioned linear receivers.

A microstrip array antenna with 45-degree inclined linear polarization is proposed for automotive radars. The proposed antenna has the advantages of high aperture efficiency, low profile and ease of manufacture. The rectangular radiating elements inclined at 45 degrees to the straight microstrip line are directly connected to it at their corners in the proposed array antenna. The radiating element has a feature that radiation conductance for co-polarization is controlled widely enough to set desired amplitude distribution keeping excited mode for cross-polarization negligibly small. The feed line loss of the linear array antenna having 15 wavelengths is estimated 0.9 dB in the design taking the loss of the microstrip line into account. The performance of two types of developed antennas, for electrical and mechanical scanning radars, is presented. The fan beam subarray antenna for electrical scanning radars has an aperture efficiency of 53% with gain of 22.5 dBi at 76.5 GHz. For mechanical scanning radars, the two-stage series feeding circuit is also proposed for lower feed line loss and setting desired amplitude distribution. The pencil beam array antenna has an aperture efficiency of 39% with gain of 32.2 dBi at 76.5 GHz.

As head-disk spacing is reduced, the effects caused by inter-molecular level interactions between head-slider and disk media are becoming a severe stability concern of head-slider's positioning in both flying height and track following directions. Therefore, there is a need to explore simple but effective methods for characterizing two dimensional (2D) stability. Ideally methods should be easy to implement in both the laboratory and in the quality control of disk drive and component manufacturing. A reading process based in-situ method is explored in this work. The method is simple and can effectively reveal the 2D stability of the head-slider in both laboratory and manufacturing environments. The results obtained also suggest that the observable sway mode vibration of the suspension can be excited earlier than the air-bearing vibration mode, when the flying height is reduced.

In this paper, a Compensatory Neuro-Fuzzy Network (CNFN) for nonlinear system control is proposed. The compensatory fuzzy reasoning method is using adaptive fuzzy operations of neural fuzzy network that can make the fuzzy logic system more adaptive and effective. An on-line learning algorithm is proposed to automatically construct the CNFN. They are created and adapted as on-line learning proceeds via simultaneous structure and parameter learning. The structure learning is based on the fuzzy similarity measure and the parameter learning is based on backpropagation algorithm. The advantages of the proposed learning algorithm are that it converges quickly and the obtained fuzzy rules are more precise. The performance of CNFN compares excellently with other various exiting model.

In this paper, we consider the all-to-all broadcast problem in optical broadcast star networks using Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Our network model assumes that receivers are fixed-tuned and transmitters are tunable such that optical lasers assigned to transmitters have limited access to the network bandwidth; hence, each node must be equipped with multiple optical lasers and/or multiple optical filters in order to maintain a single-hop network. This paper is primarily concerned with single-hop networks, in which each node is assigned a single optical filter. Lower bounds are first established on the number of lasers per each node and the minimum schedule length, and a schedule achieving the minimum schedule length is presented. The results are applicable to arbitrary tuning delays, arbitrary numbers of wavelength channels, and optical lasers' arbitrary tuning ranges. Network models with optical devices having limited tuning ranges have not yet been considered in connection with transmission schedules, and this is the first work in this new direction.

Applying gang scheduling can alleviate the blockade problem caused by exclusively used space-sharing strategies for parallel processing. However, the original form of gang scheduling is not practical as there are several fundamental problems associated with it. Recently many researchers have developed new strategies to alleviate some of these problems. Unfortunately, one important problem has not been so far seriously addressed, that is, how to set the length of time slots to obtain a good performance of gang scheduling. In this paper we present a strategy to deal with this important issue for efficient gang scheduling.

Frequency-domain representation of the well-known time-domain rake combining for the antenna diversity reception of DS-CDMA signals is derived. Two receiver structures using frequency-domain rake combining are presented. Frequency-domain rake combining can alleviate the complexity problem of the time-domain rake arising from too many paths in a severe frequency selective fading channel at the cost of guard interval insertion. The results shown in this paper show a possibility that a DS-CDMA approach still remain to be promising for broadband wireless access technique.

This letter addresses the performance degradation due to carrier frequency offset in an orthogonal frequency and code division multiplexing (OFCDM) systems with multiple transmit antennas. For the performance evaluation, the average bit error rate (BER) expression is derived taking account of the effect of a carrier frequency offset. Derived results show that the BER performance of the space-time coded OFCDM system is less sensitive to a frequency offset, compared to the normal OFCDM system.

In this paper, we present our investigation of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) on the local query regions for solving the computation restrictions of the LSI on the global information space. Through the experiments with different SVD dimensionality on the local query regions, the results show that low-dimensional LSI can achieve much better precision than VSM and similar precision to global LSI. Such small SVD factors indicate that there is an almost linear surface in the local query regions. The largest or the two largest singular vectors have the ability to capture such a linear surface and benefit the particular query. In spite of the fact that Local LSI analysis needs to perform the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) computation for each query, the surprisingly small requirements of the SVD dimension resolve the computation restrictions of LSI for large scale IR tasks. Moreover, on the condition that several relevant sample documents are available, application of low dimensional LSI for these documents can obtain comparable precision with the Local RF in a different manner.