The major concern at a branch point in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks for point-to-multipoint available bit rate (ABR) services is how to consolidate backward resource management (BRM) cells from each branch for a multicast connection. In this paper, we propose an efficient feedback consolidation algorithm based on an adaptive dynamic threshold (ADT) to eliminate consolidation noise and to reduce consolidation delay. The main idea of the ADT algorithm is that each branch point estimates the ABR traffic condition of the network through virtual queue estimation. Simulation results show that the proposed ADT algorithm can achieve a faster response in congestion status and a higher link utilization compared with the previous works.

We report the measurements on the ramp-edge type Josephson and quasiparticle tunnel junctions with the different interface angle geometry using high-Tc YBa2Cu3O7-y (YBCO) electrodes. The YBCO/I/Ag tunnel junctions with different crystal-interface boundary angles are fabricated for the investigation of zero bias conductance peak. The angle dependent zero bias conductance peak typical to a dx2-y2-wave superconductor is observable. For Josephson junctions, YBCO ramp-edge junctions with different ab-plane electrodes relatively rotated by 45are fabricated using a CeO2 seed-layer technique. The temperature dependence of the maximum Josephson current for YBCO/PBCO/YBCO junctions (PBCO: PrBa2Cu3O7-y) exhibits angle-dependent behavior, qualitatively different from the Ambegaokar-Baratoff prediction. Under microwave irradiation of 9 GHz, the Shapiro steps appear at integer and/or half integer multiples of the voltage satisfying Josephson voltage-frequency relation, whose behavior depends on the sample angle geometry. The results are reasonably interpreted by the dx2-y2-wave theory by taking the zero energy state into account.

Scaled models for an anatomical head model and a simple head model are used to investigate the effects of head size on SAR characteristics for a cellular phone exposure at 835 MHz. From the results, we can see that a larger head produces a higher localized SAR and a lower whole-head averaged SAR.

This paper proposes an adaptive transmission scheme for web prefetching in wireless communication systems. The proposed adaptive transmission scheme controls the modulation format and the error control scheme according to the access probability of the web document being transmitted. In the proposed system, the actually requested documents and the documents which have high access probability are transmitted with a reliable transmission format, while the pages whose access probabilities are lower than a certain threshold are transmitted with a bandwidth efficient transmission format. The computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme drastically improves the latency performance.

The size dependent properties of the intrinsic Josephson junctions in Bi2Sr2CaCu2Oy single crystal mesas in the external magnetic field are studied. The mesas of (1-140) µm long with 7-29 junctions were fabricated and their current-voltage characteristics were measured in external magnetic field applied parallel to the CuO2 layers up to 0.16 T. In zero magnetic field, multiple resistive branches with large hysteresis were observed in the current-voltage characteristics for the fabricated mesas. Almost identical critical currents were also observed for all the junctions in each mesa. With applied magnetic field, Ic of the longer mesas showed a complex magnetic field dependence as compared to that of the short mesas (of about 1 µm in length). It was observed that the lower critical magnetic field of the junctions decreased and approached a constant value with increasing number of junctions and also with increasing length of the junctions. Similar magnetic behavior was obtained by numerical simulations based on coupled sine-Gordon equations for such stacked junctions.

This paper presents an improved spectral subtraction method for speech enhancement. A new noise estimation method is derived in which the noise is assumed to be white. By using the property that a white noise spectrum is flat, high frequency components of a noisy speech spectrum are averaged and the standard deviation of the noise is estimated. This operation is performed in the analysis segment, thus the spectral subtraction method combined with the new noise estimation method does not need non-speech segments and as a result can adapt to non-stationary noise conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed spectral subtraction method is confirmed by experiments.

Transmitter diversity is a powerful technique to improve the transmission quality of downlink in microcellular mobile communications systems. Under cochannel interference (CCI) at the base station (BS), the transmitter diversity is not necessarily effective, because the desired-plus-interference signal power used as a criterion of downlink branch selection is not always relative to the downlink propagation condition. This paper proposes the theoretical derivation of bit error rate (BER) performance in the transmitter diversity under CCI occurring at BS, as parameters of average SIR at BS, normalized Doppler frequency, and so on. It is confirmed from the correspondence of theoretical results with simulation results that the proposed theoretical approach is applicable to the CCI environments at BS.

As a new type of a linear decorrelating receiver, the Pseudo-Decorrelator was presented for asynchronous code division multiple access systems in [6]. In this paper, the concept of the Pseudo-Decorrelator is extended to derive a suboptimal receiver for WCDMA uplink systems in a Rayleigh fading environment. Starting with the analysis of the multiple access components of the decision statistics, a non-square cross-correlation matrix for each bit is obtained. This cross-correlation matrix is then inverted and the inverted matrix is applied to the decision statistics obtained from a conventional receiver. Simulation results are presented for K-user systems over a Rayleigh fading channel. The effects of the synchronization errors, such as time delays and carrier phase errors, are also examined through simulations in this paper.

This paper presents some new protocols for (M+1)st-price auction, a style of auction in which the highest M bidders win and pay a uniform price, determined by the (M+1)st price. A set of distributed servers collaborates to resolve the (M+1)st price without revealing any information in terms of bids including the winners' bids. A new trick to jointly and securely compute the highest value as a degree of distributed polynomials is introduced. The building block requires just one round for bidders to cast bids and one round for auctioneers to determine the winners.

A method for fast calibration of digital-beam-forming (DBF) receiving array antennas by means of digital signal processing is described. It uses plane wave arriving from a known direction that contains a known reference sequence. Non-uniformities of the amplitude and phase in the branches are detected and calibrated in real time by the complex correlation of a replica of the known reference sequence with the received signal obtained from the output signals of each element. No special circuit for calibration is required, and the non-uniformities can quickly be compensated for by digital signal processing even for an array antenna with many antenna elements. This method enables highly accurate calibration of large-scale array antennas operating at a high frequency even under a low signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR).

We have fabricated a novel type of intrinsic Josephson junctions with superconducting Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+y (Bi-2212)/YBa2Cu3O7-x(YBCO) bilayer thin films deposited on MgO(100) substrates. We used the 4th harmonics of a Nd:YAG pulsed laser ablation. Furthermore, we studied the transport properties of a 25 µm 25 µm Bi-2212/YBCO mesa-type junction. The zero resistance temperature was around 50 K. The current-voltage characteristics showed flux-flow-like behavior and a supercurrent of about 2 mA at 4.2 K. Shapiro steps were observed when microwave was irradiated to the mesa junction. These Shapiro steps are attributed to the Josephson junction formed at the interface between the Bi-2212 and YBCO layers in the mesa structure and not to the intrinsic Josephson junctions in the Bi-2212 layer or the micro-grains within the films.

Existing code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular systems achieve capacity gains over conventional time division multiple access (TDMA) or frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, by assuming a large number of low data-rate and hence low power users uniformly distributed over a cell. In current CDMA proposals for providing higher data-rate packet services, however, burst high data-rate users do not satisfy this assumption and thus the capacity advantage is lost. In this letter, we quantify the capacity loss with focusing on location-dependent aspects of the degradation. This work contributes to a better understanding of the capacity problem encountered when introducing high data-rate packet services with the cellular band where existing low data-rate CDMA systems operate.

This contribution discusses which information can be derived from estimated directions of arrival (DOAs) and directions of departure (DODs) from a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio system, and establishes two new parameters describing the multipath spread at both link ends. We find that the multipath component separation, MCS, combines delay, (double-) angular and Doppler dispersion, as appropriate. MCS provides a system-independent radio characterization of propagation environments and aids in selecting optimum positions for smart-antenna deployment. Evaluation of double-directional measurements (antenna arrays at both link ends) in indoor environments show the usefulness and the limits of the multipath component separation concept.

Almost all land animals coordinate their behavior with circadian rhythms, matching their functions to the daily cycles of lightness and darkness that result from the rotation of the earth corresponding to 24 hours. Through external stimuli, such as dairy life activities or other sources from our environment may influence the internal rhythmicity of sleep and waking properties. However, the rhythms are regulated to keep their activity constant by homeostasis while fluctuating by incessant influences of external forces. A modeling study has been developed to identify homeostatic dynamics properties underlying a circadian rhythm activity of Sleep and Wake data measured from normal subjects, using an MA (Moving Average) model associated with Backpropagation (BP) algorithm. As results, we found that the neural network can capture the regularity and irregularity components included in the data. The order of MA neural network model depends on subjects behavior, the first two orders are usually dominant in the case of no strong external forces. The adaptive dynamic changes are evaluated by the change of weight vectors, a kind of internal representation of the trained network. The dynamic is kept in a steady state for more than 20 days at most. Identified properties reflect the subject's behavior, and hence may be useful for medical diagnoses of disorders related to circadian rhythms.

Implementation of Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) channel sounder is considered, taking hardware cost and realtime measurement into account. A remarkable difference between MIMO and conventional Single-Input Multi-Output (SIMO) channel sounding is that the MIMO sounder needs some kind of multiplexing to distinguish transmitting antennas. We compared three types of multiplexing TDM, FDM, and CDM for the sounding purpose, then we chose FDM based technique to achieve cost effectiveness and realtime measurement. In the framework of FDM, we have proposed an algorithm to estimate MIMO channel parameters. Furthermore the proposed algorithm was implemented into the hardware, and the validity of the proposed algorithm was evaluated through measurements in an anechoic chamber.

A new class of least-squares algorithms is presented for adaptive filtering. The idea is to use a fixed set of directions and perform line search with one direction at a time in a cyclic fashion. These algorithms are called Euclidean Direction Search (EDS) algorithms. The fast version of this class is called the Fast-EDS or FEDS algorithm. It is shown to have O(N) computational complexity and a convergence rate comparable to that of the RLS algorithm. Computer simulations are presented to illustrate the performance of the new algorithm.

We fabricated ramp-edge junctions with barriers by modifying surface and integrating ground-planes. The fabricated junctions had current-voltage characteristics consistent with the resistive shunted-junction model. We also obtained a 1-sigma spread in the critical current of 7.9% for 100 junctions at 4.2 K. The ground-plane reduced the sheet inductance of a stripline by a factor of 3. The quality of the ground-plane was improved by using an anneal in oxygen atmosphere after fabrication. The sheet inductance of a counter-electrode with a ground-plane was 1.0 pH per square at 4.2 K.

A robust adaptive beamforming method is proposed to cancel coherent, as well as incoherent, interference using an array of arbitrary geometry. In this method, coherent interferences are suppressed by a transformation of received data with the estimates of their arrival angles and then, to reject incoherent interferences, the array output power is minimized subject to the look direction constraint in the transformed signal-plus-interference (TSI) subspace. This TSI subspace-based beamforming results in robustness to errors in the angle estimations. Its performance is theoretically examined. The theoretic results conform to simulation results. It is straightforward to apply the theoretic results to the performance analysis of subspace-based adaptive beamfomers only for incoherent interference cancellation.

This paper proposes a credit-based congestion control scheme for multicast communication which employs application-specific processing at intermediate network nodes. The control scheme was designed not only to take advantage of credit-based flow control for unicast communication, but also to achieve flexibility supported by active network technology. The resultant active multicast congestion control scheme is able to meet the different requirements of various multicast applications in terms of reliability and end-to-end latency. The performance of the proposed control scheme was evaluated using both discrete-event simulations and experiments on a prototype active network implementation. The results show that the proposed scheme performs very well in terms of fairness, responsiveness, and scalability. The implementation experiences also confirmed the feasibility of the scheme in practice.

Eigenstructure-based beamformers suffer form performance degradation due to pointing errors when the number of the incident signals is incorrectly detected or when the desired signal is much stronger than the interferences. We present a robust beamformer with the self-correction of look direction errors, based on the Newton method. Even though there are errors in the detection of the incident signal number as well as in the presumed look direction, it can achieve optimum performance with no errors.