Base station (BS) cooperation is a promising technique to suppress co-channel interference for cellular networks. However, practical limitations constrain the scale of cooperation, thus the network is divided into small disjoint BS cooperation groups, namely clusters. A decentralized scheme for BS cluster formation is proposed based on efficient BS negotiations, of which the feedback overhead per user is nearly irrelevant to the network size, and the number of iteration rounds scales very slowly with the network size. Simulations show that our decentralized scheme provides significant sum-rate gain over static clustering and performs almost the same as the existing centralized approach. The proposed scheme is well suited for large-scale cellular networks due to its low overhead and complexity.

To satisfy the requirement of a unified platform which can flexibly deal with various wireless radio systems, we proposed and implemented a heterogeneous network system composed of distributed flexible access points and a protocol-free signal processing unit. Distributed flexible access points are remote RF devices which perform the reception of multiple types of radio wave data and transfer the received data to the protocol-free signal processing unit through wired access network. The protocol-free signal processing unit performs multiple types of signal analysis by software. To realize a highly flexible and efficient radio wave data reception and transfer, we employ the recently developed compressed sensing technology. Moreover, we propose a combined Nyquist and compressed sampling method for the decoding signals to be sampled at the Nyquist rate and for the sensing signals to be sampled at the compressed rate. For this purpose, the decoding signals and the sensing signals are converted into the intermediate band frequency (IF) and mixed. In the IF band, the decoding signals are set at lower center frequencies than those of the sensing signals. The down converted signals are sampled at the rate of four times of the whole bandwidth of the decoding signals plus two times of the whole bandwidth of the sensing signals. The purpose of above setting is to simultaneously conduct Nyquist rate and compressed rate sampling in a single ADC. Then, all of odd (or even) samples are preserved and some of even (or odd) samples are randomly discarded. This method reduces the data transfer burden in dealing with the sensing signals while guaranteeing the realization of Nyquist-rate decoding performance. Simulation and experiment results validate the efficiency of the proposed method.

Transmission of convolutionally encoded source-codec parameters over noisy channels can benefit from the turbo principle through iterative source-channel decoding. We first formulate a recursive implementation based on sectionalized code trellises for MAP symbol decoding of binary convolutional codes. Performance is further enhanced by the use of an interpolative softbit source decoder that takes into account the channel outputs within an interleaving block. Simulation results indicate that our proposed scheme allows to exchange between its constituent decoders the symbol-level extrinsic information and achieves high robustness against channel noises.

This letter proposes a novel censor-based scheme for cooperative spectrum sensing on Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks. A Takagi-Sugeno's fuzzy system is proposed to make the decision on the presence of the licensed user's signal based on the observed energy at each cognitive sensor node. The local spectrum sensing results are aggregated to make the final sensing decision at the fusion center after being censored to reduce transmission energy and reporting time. Simulation results show that significant improvement of the spectrum sensing accuracy, and saving energy as well as reporting time are achieved by our scheme.

Currently, there are various routing methods that consider the energy in a wireless sensor environment. The algorithm we consider is a low-rate wireless personal area network, viz., 802.15.4, and ZigBee routing network. Considering, the overall organization of the network energy efficiency, we suggest a logical position exchange (LPE) algorithm between specified nodes. Logical positioning means connecting high sub-networks and low sub-networks based on the neighbor nodes information of the address ID, and depth in the ZigBee tree topology network. When one of the nodes of the tree topology network, which is responsible for connecting multiple low sub-networks and high sub-networks, has difficulty performing its important roles in the network, because of energy exhaustion, it exchanges essential information and entrusts logical positioning to another node that is capable of it. A partial change in the logical topology enhances the energy efficiency in the network.

One of the major drawbacks of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is their vulnerability to synchronization errors. To remedy the inter-carrier interference (ICI) effect caused by carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation errors, this paper proposes a weighted linear parallel ICI cancellation (WLPICIC) equalizer. The optimal weights in the WLPICIC scheme are derived in closed-form expressions by maximizing the average signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) at the WLPICIC output of each sub-carrier. The simulation results show that the WLPICIC equalizer significantly improves the performance of OFDM systems with frequency estimation errors in both AWGN channels and frequency selective fading channels.

A novel square patch antenna with reconfigurable circular polarization (CP) is presented in this letter. A circular slot with perturbation is placed beneath the patch. The circular slot that has an inner perturbation yields right-handed CP, but with an outer perturbation slot yields left-handed CP. Experiments show an antenna gain of 2.8 dBic and a 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth of 30 MHz which well match the corresponding simulation results.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) repeater systems have been discussed in several published papers. When a repeater has only one antenna element, the propagation environment is called keyhole. In this kind of scenario the achievable channel capacity and link quality are decreased. Another limit is when the number of the antenna elements of a repeater is larger than that of a MIMO transceiver, the channel capacity cannot be increased. In this paper, in order to obtain an upper bound of the channel capacity, we express a propagation process of the distributed MIMO repeater system with amplify-and-forward method by the numerical formular, and optimize the position of each repeater.

This paper proposes two algorithms to balance energy consumption among sensor nodes by distributing the workload of image compression tasks within a cluster on wireless sensor networks. The main point of the proposed algorithms is to adopt the energy threshold, which is used when we implement the exchange and/or assignment of tasks among sensor nodes. The threshold is well adaptive to the residual energy of sensor nodes, input image, compressed output, and network parameters. We apply the lapped transform technique, an extended version of the discrete cosine transform, and run length encoding before Lempel-Ziv-Welch coding to the proposed algorithms to improve both quality and compression rate in image compression scheme. We extensively conduct computational experiments to verify the our methods and find that the proposed algorithms achieve not only balancing the total energy consumption among sensor nodes and, thus, increasing the overall network lifetime, but also reducing block noise in image compression.

The Firing Squad Synchronization Problem (FSSP), one of the most well-known problems related to cellular automata, was originally proposed by Myhill in 1957 and became famous through the work of Moore [1]. The first solution to this problem was given by Minsky and McCarthy [2] and a minimal time solution was given by Goto [3]. A significant amount of research has also dealt with variants of this problem. In this paper, from a theoretical interest, we will extend this problem to number patterns on a seven-segment display. Some of these problems can be generalized as the FSSP for some special trees called segment trees. The FSSP for segment trees can be reduced to a FSSP for a one-dimensional array divided evenly by joint cells that we call segment array. We will give algorithms to solve the FSSPs for this segment array and other number patterns, respectively. Moreover, we will clarify the minimal time to solve these problems and show that there exists no such solution.

This paper proposes approaches to perform HW/SW (Hardware/Software) partition and parallelization of computing-intensive tasks of the H.264 HiP (High Profile) decoding algorithm on an embedded coarse-grained reconfigurable multimedia system, called REMUS (REconfigurable MUltimedia System). Several techniques, such as MB (Macro-Block) based parallelization, unfixed sub-block operation etc., are utilized to speed up the decoding process, satisfying the requirements of real-time and high quality H.264 applications. Tests show that the execution performance of MC (Motion Compensation), deblocking, and IDCT-IQ (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform-Inverse Quantization) on REMUS is improved by 60%, 73%, 88.5% in the typical case and 60%, 69%, 88.5% in the worst case, respectively compared with that on XPP PACT (a commercial reconfigurable processor). Compared with ASIC solutions, the performance of MC is improved by 70%, 74% in the typical and in the worst case, respectively, while those of Deblocking remain the same. As for IDCT_IQ, the performance is improved by 17% no matter in the typical or worst case. Relying on the proposed techniques, 1080p@30 fps of H.264 HiP@ Level 4 decoding could be achieved on REMUS when utilizing a 200 MHz working frequency.

The performance of the kernel-based learning algorithms, such as SVM, depends heavily on the proper choice of the kernel parameter. It is desirable for the kernel machines to work on the optimal kernel parameter that adapts well to the input data and the learning tasks. In this paper, we present a novel method for selecting Gaussian kernel parameter by maximizing a class separability criterion, which measures the data distribution in the kernel-induced feature space, and is invariant under any non-singular linear transformation. The experimental results show that both the class separability of the data in the kernel-induced feature space and the classification performance of the SVM classifier are improved by using the optimal kernel parameter.

This paper proposes a new hybrid method for machine transliteration. Our method is based on combining a newly proposed two-step conditional random field (CRF) method and the well-known joint source channel model (JSCM). The contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) A two-step CRF model for machine transliteration is proposed. The first CRF segments a character string of an input word into chunks and the second one converts each chunk into a character in the target language. (2) A joint optimization method of the two-step CRF model and a fast decoding algorithm are also proposed. Our experiments show that the joint optimization of the two-step CRF model works as well as or even better than the JSCM, and the fast decoding algorithm significantly decreases the decoding time. (3) A rapid development method based on a weighted finite state transducer (WFST) framework for the JSCM is proposed. (4) The combination of the proposed two-step CRF model and JSCM outperforms the state-of-the-art result in terms of top-1 accuracy.

In this letter, a new feedback equalization scheme to suppress inter-carrier interference (ICI) in an OFDM system using scattered pilot is investigated. On a fast fading channel severe ICI occurs due to a Doppler shift and it deteriorates a bit error rate (BER) seriously because of small subcarrier spacing. In an ISDB-T receiver the equalization is mainly processed in a frequency domain because the scattered pilot is transmitted over the subcarriers. However, the frequency domain equalization may not suppress severe ICI in the case of the fast fading channel with a large Doppler shift. The proposed equalization scheme uses the scattered pilot symbols transformed in a time domain as the reference signal for feedback taps. Numerical results through computer simulation show that the proposed scheme improves the BER performance especially with low carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) conditions.

The multistage noise-shaping (MASH) delta-sigma modulator (DSM) is the key element in a fractional-N frequency synthesizer. A hardware simplification method with subtraction inversion is proposed for delta-path's design in a MASH delta-sigma modulator. The subtraction inversion method focuses on simplification of adder-subtractor unit in the delta path with inversion of subtraction signal. It achieves with less hardware cost as compared with the conventional approaches. As a result, the hardware organization is regular and easy for expanding into higher order MASH DSM design. Analytical details of the implementation way and hardware cost function with N-th order configuration are presented. Finally, simulations with hardware description language as well as synthesis data verified the proposed design method.

In an embedded control system, control performances of each job depend on its latency and a control algorithm implemented in it. In order to adapt a job set to optimize control performances subject to schedulability, we design several types of control software for each job, which will be called versions, and select one version from them when the job is released. A real-time system where each job has several versions is called a multiversion real-time system. A benefit and a CPU utilization of a job depend on the versions. So, it is an important problem to select a version of each job so as to maximize the total benefit of the system subject to a schedulability condition. Such a problem will be called an optimal configuration problem. In this paper, we assume that each version is specified by the relative deadline, the execution time, and the benefit. We show that the optimal configuration problem is transformed to a maximum path length problem. We propose an optimal algorithm based on the forward dynamic programming. Moreover, we propose sub-optimal algorithms to reduce computation times. The efficiencies of the proposed algorithms are illustrated by simulations.

The spectrum handoff problem for cognitive radio systems is considered in this paper. The secondary users (SUs) can only opportunistically access the spectrum holes, i.e. the frequency channels unoccupied by the primary users (PUs). As long as a PU appears, SUs have to vacate the channel to avoid interference to PUs and switch to another available channel. In this paper, a prediction-based spectrum handoff scheme is proposed to reduce the negative effect (both the interference to PUs and the service block of SUs) during the switching time. In the proposed scheme, a hidden Markov model is used to predict the occupancy of a frequency channel. By estimating the state of the model in the next time instant, we can predict whether the frequency channel will be occupied by PUs or not. As a cross-layer design, the spectrum sensing performance parameters false alarm probability and missing detection probability are taken into account to enhance accuracy of the channel occupancy prediction. The proposed scheme will react on the spectrum sensing algorithm parameters while the spectrum handoff performance is significantly affected by them. The interference to the PUs could be reduced obviously by adapting the proposed spectrum handoff scheme, associated with a potential increase of switch delay of SUs. It will also be helpful for SUs to save broadband scan time and prefer an appropriate objective channel so as to avoid service block. Numerical results demonstrate the above performance improvement by using this prediction-based scheme.

In order to evaluate the goodness of frequency hopping sequence design, the periodic Hamming correlation function is used as an important measure. Usually, the length of correlation window is shorter than the period of the chosen frequency hopping sequence, so the study of the partial Hamming correlation of frequency hopping sequence is particularly important. In this paper, the maximum partial Hamming correlation lower bounds of frequency hopping sequences with low hit zone, with respect to the size of the frequency slot set, the length of correlation window, the family size, the low hit zone, the maximum partial Hamming autocorrelation and the maximum partial Hamming crosscorrelation are established. It is shown that the new bounds include the known Lempel-Greenberger bound, Peng-Fan bounds, Eun-Jin-Hong-Song bound and Peng-Fan-Lee bounds as special cases.

Broadband wireless technology that enables a variety of gigabit-per-second class data services is a requirement in future wireless communication systems. Broadband wireless channels become extremely frequency-selective and cause severe inter-symbol interference (ISI). Furthermore, the average received signal power changes in a random manner because of the shadowing and distance-dependant path losses resulted from the movement of a mobile terminal (MT). Accordingly, the transmission performance severely degrades. To overcome the performance degradation, two most promising approaches are the frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and distributed antenna network (DAN). The former takes advantage of channel frequency-selectivity to obtain the frequency-diversity gain. In DAN, a group of distributed antennas serve each user to mitigate the negative impact of shadowing and path losses. This article will introduce the recent advances in FDE and DAN for the broadband single-carrier (SC) transmissions.

Recently there has been a surge of interest in construction of low correlation zone sequences. The purpose of this paper is to survey the known results in the area and to present an interleaved construction of binary low correlation zone sequences. The interleaved construction unifies many constructions currently available in the literature. These sequences are useful in quasi-synchronous code-division multiple access (QS-CDMA) communication systems.