The growth in the volume of Internet traffic and the increasing variety of Internet applications require Internet backbone networks to be scalable and provided sophisticated quality of service (QoS) capabilities. Internet backbone routers have evolved to achieve sub-Tbps switching capacity in a single unit, but their switch architectures have limited scalability, causing QoS to degrade as the switches get bigger. Hence, we propose a large-scale IP and lambda integrated router architecture with scalable switches. We first describe the system architecture of our proposed backbone router and clarify the requirements for its switching capabilities to meet near-future demands. The new switch architecture, using crossbar-based switching fabrics and optical interconnection devices, meets the requirements for a backbone router to scale up to 82 Tbps and enable light path switching as well as packet switching. The routing tag and its usage algorithm in the switch, and packaging issues, including the quantity of hardware required for expansion, are also discussed.

This paper presents the design consideration of a polarization-transformation transmission filter, which is composed of a multilayered chiral slab. The optimal material parameters and thickness of each layer of the slab can be determined by using a genetic algorithm (GA). Substituting the constitutive relations for a chiral medium into Maxwell's equations, the electromagnetic field in the medium is obtained. A chain-matrix formulation is used to derive the relationship between the components of the incident, the reflected, and the transmitted electric fields. The cross- and co-polarized powers carried by the transmitted and reflected waves are represented in terms of their electric field components. The procedure proposed for the design of a polarization-transformation filter is divided into two stages. An ordinary filter without polarization-transformation and a polarization-transformation filter for the transmitted wave are designed with a multilayered non-chiral slab and a multilayered chiral slab at the first and the second stages, respectively. According to the specifications of the filters, two functionals are defined with the transmitted and reflected powers. Thus the optimal design of a polarization-transformation filter with the multilayered chiral slab is reduced to an optimization problem where the material parameters and thickness of each chiral layer are found by maximizing the functionals. Applying the GA to the maximization of the functionals, one can obtain the optimal material parameters and thicknesses of the multilayered chiral slab. Numerical results are presented to confirm the effectiveness of the two-stage design procedure. For three types of multilayered chiral slabs, optimal values of refractive indices, thicknesses, and chiral admittances are obtained. It is seen from the numerical results that the proposed procedure is very effective in the optimal design of polarization-transformation filters for the transmitted wave.

Integration of the IP/MPLS network and the WDM optical mesh network is a promising approach to realizing an efficient backbone network. Because of the great volumes of traffic carried, the social cost incurred by a failure will be extremely high, so survivability is very important in the backbone network. In survivable IP/MPLS over WDM backbone networks, cooperation of the optical level fault recovery and the IP/MPLS level fault recovery is essential. This paper analyzes cost characteristics of the optical level fault recovery and the IP/MPLS level fault recovery. A mathematical programming method is proposed to minimize the initial network cost when the IP/MPLS level fault recovery is utilized in the survivable IP/MPLS over WDM networks. Using this method, the initial network cost needed for the IP/MPLS level fault recovery is compared with that for the optical level fault recovery. The initial network cost for the LSP (Label Switched Path) protection scheme is smaller than that for the shared light-path protection scheme and larger than that for the pre-plan type light-path restoration scheme. The LSP protection scheme is suitable for the best-effort type traffic while the shared light-path protection scheme may be suitable for the bandwidth guaranteed type traffic.

In this paper, we propose a scalable Extended Differentiated-Services (EDS) architecture to guarantee edge-to-edge explicit rate allocation. In presence of flows with explicit rate allocation, to share bandwidth fairly, a new fairness definition is proposed. Based on EDS and the proposed fairness definition, a scalable fair Edge-to-Edge Congestion Control Algorithm with Explicit Rate Allocation (ECC-ERA) is presented to solve the bandwidth assurance problem facing Differentiated Service architecture, where EDS uses congestion control packets to carry the flow-related states and congestion control information. By designing efficiency control and fairness control separately, the ECC-ERA can achieve good scalability to link capacity, round-trip time and number of flows. It will be shown that EDS plus ECC-ERA outperforms the general Diff-Serv bandwidth guarantee approaches. The main advantages of EDS+ECC-ERA are as follows: (1) it not only can guarantee explicit rate allocation, but also can guarantee near-zero packet loss in core routers, high utilization, lower and smoother queueing delay, better fairness and better protection from unresponsive traffic. (2) Neither resource pre-reservation nor sophisticated scheduling mechanisms are required. The simple FIFO at core routers is enough. (3) EDS plus EC-ERA is very efficient and can be used as end-to-end QoS building block.

It is very difficult to simultaneously achieve power and cost reductions in address-driver circuits of a plasma-display panel (PDP) unit in which an energy-recovery scheme utilizing the resonance of a series-connected inductor and electrode parasitic capacitors is used. This is because an increase in parasitic capacitance and high-speed circuit operation become necessary as the display panel becomes larger in size and higher in resolution. In particular, low-power operation of address-driver ICs is key to avoiding the installation of heat sinks on the ICs. We propose herein new power-dispersion methods that can greatly reduce the power dissipation of address-driver ICs even when large parasitic capacitance is driven at high speed. The proposed methods enable a reduction in the power dissipation of address-driver ICs without deteriorating the operational speed by dispersing their powers into external resistors, and by supplying power to address-driver ICs in two voltage steps during both rising and falling time intervals when the address changes. Our results indicate that the power dissipation of address-driver ICs and the total cost of the address drive unit of a plasma-display panel can be reduced to 29% and 53%, respectively, compared with those of the ICs and the unit that are driven by the conventional address-driving method.

The applications of biometrics in the real world include various types of large-scale "one-to-many" identification, which require high performance classification technology. This paper presents a system with a classification algorithm that integrates multiple features observed in a set of fingerprints and uses them, to pre-select candidates, for more efficient personal identification from a very large fingerprint enrollment database. The algorithm determines a fingerprint's pattern type by using both ridge structure analysis and direction-based neural networks. It measures such additional feature characteristics as core-delta distance and ridge counts in parallel, along with confidence indexes associated with each feature. The pre-selector then integrates the set of obtained features from multiple fingers, after weighting them according to each feature's inherent ability to contribute to the selection process and the expected errors in observations of that feature. The system calculates the similarity between pairs of sets on the basis of feature differences, statistically evaluates the conditional probability of each pair being a correct match, and selects most similar collection of candidates for detailed matching. Experimental results confirm that it achieves an effective pre-selecting capability of 0.2% average selection (false acceptance or penetration) rate with 2% selection error (false rejection) rate.

A problem of estimating biopotential sources in the brain based on EEG signals observed on the scalp is known as an important inverse problem of electrophysiology. Usually there is no closed-form solution for this problem and it requires iterative techniques such as the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. Considering the nonlinear properties of inverse problem, and signal to noise ratio inherent in EEG signals, a back propagation neural network has been recently proposed as a solution. In this paper, we investigated the properties of neural networks and its localization accuracy for single dipole source localization. Based on the results of extensive studies, we concluded the neural networks are highly feasible in single-source localization with a small number of electrodes (18 electrodes), also examined the usefulness of this method for clinical application with a case of epilepsy.

The file sizes of on going flows are fairly disparate on the current network. In this letter, we propose an "age-based" packet discard scheme in the Traffic Conditioner (TC) of a gateway to improve the performance of file transmission. The on going flows will be grouped to three classes of priority according to their "age" as network congestion occurs and the simulation results show that the proposed model can work efficiently in most of the congestion conditions.

This paper examines the descriptive power and the limitations of a simple reinforcement learning model (REL), comparing the simulation results with the results of an economic experiment employing human subjects. Agent-based computational economics and experimental economics are becoming increasingly popular as tools for economists. A new variety of learning model using games with a unique equilibrium is proposed and examined in both of the fields mentioned above. However, little attention is given to games with multiple equilibria. We examine threshold public goods games with two types of equilibria, where each player in a five-person group simultaneously contributes the public goods from her private endowments. In the experiments, we observe two patterns of the subjects' behavior: the cooperative and non-cooperative patterns. Our simulation results show that the REL reproduces the cooperative pattern, but does not reproduce the non-cooperative pattern. However, the results suggest that the REL does reproduce the non-cooperative pattern in terms of the agents' internal states. That implies that deterministic strategies would be required to reproduce the non-cooperative pattern in the games. We show an example of the REL with deterministic strategies.

This paper first presents an active integrated antenna configuration designed for broadband mobile wireless access systems using the 25-GHz band. This active integrated antenna comprises a microstrip antenna array and RF front-end circuits adopting spatial power combining schemes for reduced power consumption of the power amplifiers. Furthermore, the antenna and RF circuits are integrated into each side of a thick copper backing plate and both are connected through microstrip line /slot transitions. The developed active integrated antenna achieves the output power of 14.6 dBm and a noise figure of less than 5 dB. The wireless system using the developed active integrated antenna achieves a 6-dB improvement in the packet error rate compared to that using a passive antenna with the same array design as the active integrated antenna. Furthermore, we obtained the first license of the active integrated antenna for commercial use in high-speed wireless communication systems in Japan.

A new formula on the Hermite expansion is presented in an explicit form. An application of the formula is given to a random boundary value problem: a plane wave reflection from a flat plane, of which position is randomly distributed in the normal direction, is presented. Several numerical results are given for a verification of the formula and for a discussion of the exact behavior of the fluctuation part of the reflection power.

This paper addresses the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem in a wavelength routed all optical network. One of the main issues is the assignment of the limited number of wavelengths over each physical fiber connection so that high aggregate capacity can be achieved. In a typical mesh topology, this problem has been shown to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic based algorithm building upon one of the best known wavelength assignment algorithms proposed by Zhang and Acampora. The salient feature of the proposed algorithm is to consider the inherent multihop nature of the underlying mesh topology. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm reduces the complexity by an order of magnitude, while at the same time achieving significantly lower blocking probability.

In this paper, we first address the current state of broadband services in Korea. Here, we introduce relevant statistics, current access network architectures, and activities of some major carriers. We also briefly introduce Korean government's policies on research and development projects and plans for promoting the country toward an advanced information society. We then introduce a large-scale, collaborative project named "Photonic Access To the Home (PATH)" with five-year period of performance, started in year 2002. The project is under leadership of the government and ETRI in collaboration with universities and industry. We finally provide a rather detailed description of the FTTH (Fiber To The Home) technology based on the wavelength division multiplexing technology, which has been under research in our laboratory as a part of the PATH project. We show some of our achievement including new architectures and networking principles for the FTTH network, analysis of the dynamic allocation of user bandwidth, and the experiment for a low-cost WDM optical source.

Implementation issues on generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) -based photonic switching networks are experimentally analyzed. A resilient control plane architecture using in-fiber and out-of-fiber control channels is proposed to resolve issues of establishing the control plane in out-of-band networks. The resilient control plane is demonstrated in a photonic cross-connect (PXC) -based GMPLS network involving a 1,000 km transmission line. Fast signaling for provisioning and restoration operation is accomplished by implementing in-fiber control channels as primary, and the out-of-fiber control channels effectively operate as secondary and restore messaging of the control information between neighbors. The control channel protection is initiated by the link management protocol (LMP). Using the test bed, optical layer routing operation is investigated to assess the effects on the signal quality of wavelength paths, and transparent routing of the wavelength paths over one-hop and two-hops route is demonstrated within 1 dB difference regarding the Q factor. Stable operation of loss of light (LOL) -triggered restoration is demonstrated by setting the optical level threshold 5 dB higher than the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise level.

In this paper we describe the investigation of design methodology of a planar duplexer consisting of BPFs using mixed tapped resonators. Firstly, we propose the planar duplexer consisting of bandpass filters (BPFs) using a tapped open-ended λ/2 resonator and a tapped λ/4 resonator. The duplexer is designed based on the general filter theory with narrow band approximation and tap-coupling technique. The actual duplexer is fabricated using a coplanar waveguide (CPW). Secondly, downsizing of the planar duplexer is carried out based on the BPF using stepped impedance resonators (SIRs). Lastly, another type of duplexer consisting of different BPFs using mixed tapped resonators is investigated in the same manner. The results of this study lead us to the conclusion that the design methodology is useful for realizing the high-performance planar duplexer fabricated without increasing the number of elements.

This paper describes a new training method of average voice model for speech synthesis in which arbitrary speaker's voice is generated based on speaker adaptation. When the amount of training data is limited, the distributions of average voice model often have bias depending on speaker and/or gender and this will degrade the quality of synthetic speech. In the proposed method, to reduce the influence of speaker dependence, we incorporate a context clustering technique called shared decision tree context clustering and speaker adaptive training into the training procedure of average voice model. From the results of subjective tests, we show that the average voice model trained using the proposed method generates more natural sounding speech than the conventional average voice model. Moreover, it is shown that voice characteristics and prosodic features of synthetic speech generated from the adapted model using the proposed method are closer to the target speaker than the conventional method.

In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the time-varying directions-of-arrival (DOAs) of coherent narrowband cyclostationary signals impinging on a uniform linear array (ULA). By exploiting the cyclostationarity of most communication signals, we investigate a new computationally efficient subspace-based direction estimation method without eigendecomposition and spatial smoothing (SS) processes. The proposed method uses the inherently temporal property of incident signals and a subarray scheme to decorrelate the signal coherency and to suppress the noise and interfering signals, while the null subspace is obtained from the resulting cyclic correlation matrix through a linear operation. Then an on-line implementation of this method is presented for tracking the DOAs of slowly moving coherent signals. The proposed algorithm is computationally simple and has a good tracking performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through numerical examples.

The OptIPuter is a radical distributed visualization, teleimmersion, data mining and computing architecture. Observing that the exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage are now much higher than Moore's Law, this major new project of several universities--currently six in the US and one in Amsterdam--exploits a new world of computing in which the central architectural element is optical networking. This transition is caused by the use of parallelism, as in supercomputing a decade ago. However, this time the parallelism is in multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, on single optical fibers, creating a LambdaGrid. Providing applications-centric middleware to control the LambdaGrid on a regional and global scale is a key goal of the OptIPuter and StarLight Optical Switching projects.

This paper presents a frequency domain simultaneous equations method capable of automatically recovering noise reduction effect degraded by secondary path changes. The simultaneous equations method has been studied, first in time domain. Accordingly to the study, in the time domain, the simultaneous equations method requires an additional filter and a system identification circuit used for transforming the solution of the simultaneous equations into the coefficients of noise control filter, which increase the processing cost. To reduce the processing cost, this paper studies on the application of a frequency domain processing technique, the cross spectrum method, to the simultaneous equations method. By directly applying the equation defining the cross spectrum method to the solution, the additional filter becomes unnecessary. In addition, the system identification circuit is replaced with the inverse Fourier transform. Thereby, the processing cost drastically decreases. This paper also presents simulation results to confirm that the proposed method can automatically recover the noise reduction effect degraded by a path change and provides much higher convergence speed than that of the filtered-x NLMS algorithm with the perfectly modeled secondary path filter.

Progress in WDM transmission technology and the development of optical cross-connect systems has made optical backbone networks a reality. The conventional planning methodologies for such optical backbone networks calculate optimum light-path arrangements to minimize the network cost under the condition that the number of demanded light-paths is given in advance. However, the light-path demand varies according to the light-path prices. Thus, a new planning methodology for the optical backbone networks is necessary to optimize the light-path prices and to maximize the profit obtained from the network. This paper proposes a new planning methodology for the survivable optical networks. This methodology is based on economic theory for competitive markets involving plural kinds of commodities. Using this methodology, the optimum light-path prices can be decided to maximize the obtained profit. A numerical example is presented to show that the obtained profit can be improved by preparing various light-path classes with different recovery modes and introducing an appropriate light-path pricing according to the reliability of each light-path class.