This paper presents dual bands and dual polarization reflectarrays for 5G millimeter wave applications. The frequency bands of 28GHz and 39GHz are allocated for 5G to realize high speed data transmission. However, these high frequency bands create coverage holes in which no link between base station and receivers is possible. Reflectarray has gained attention for reducing the size and number of coverage holes. This paper proposes a unit cell with swastika and the patch structure to construct the dual bands reflectrray operating at 28GHz and 39GHz by supercell. This paper also presents the detailed design procedure of the dual-bands reflectarray by supercell. The reflectarray is experimentally validated by a bistatic radar cross section measurement system. The experimental results are compared with simulation and reflection angle agreement is observed.

Register automaton (RA) is an extension of finite automaton by adding registers storing data values. RA has good properties such as the decidability of the membership and emptiness problems. Linear temporal logic with the freeze quantifier (LTL↓) proposed by Demri and Lazić is a counterpart of RA. However, the expressive power of LTL↓ is too high to be applied to automatic verification. In this paper, we propose a subclass of modal µ-calculus with the freeze quantifier, which has the same expressive power as RA. Since a conjunction ψ1 ∧ ψ2 in a general LTL↓ formula cannot be simulated by RA, the proposed subclass prohibits at least one of ψ1 and ψ2 from containing the freeze quantifier or a temporal operator other than X (next). Since the obtained subclass of LTL↓ does not have the ability to represent a cycle in RA, we adopt µ-calculus over the subclass of LTL↓, which allows recursive definition of temporal formulas. We provide equivalent translations from the proposed subclass of µ-calculus to RA and vice versa and prove their correctness.

The equilibrium optimizer (EO) is a novel physics-based meta-heuristic optimization algorithm that is inspired by estimating dynamics and equilibrium states in controlled volume mass balance models. As a stochastic optimization algorithm, EO inevitably produces duplicated solutions, which is wasteful of valuable evaluation opportunities. In addition, an excessive number of duplicated solutions can increase the risk of the algorithm getting trapped in local optima. In this paper, an improved EO algorithm with a bis-population-based non-revisiting (BNR) mechanism is proposed, namely BEO. It aims to eliminate duplicate solutions generated by the population during iterations, thus avoiding wasted evaluation opportunities. Furthermore, when a revisited solution is detected, the BNR mechanism activates its unique archive population learning mechanism to assist the algorithm in generating a high-quality solution using the excellent genes in the historical information, which not only improves the algorithm's population diversity but also helps the algorithm get out of the local optimum dilemma. Experimental findings with the IEEE CEC2017 benchmark demonstrate that the proposed BEO algorithm outperforms other seven representative meta-heuristic optimization techniques, including the original EO algorithm.

In this letter, we propose an energy beamforming empowered relaying scheme for a batteryless IoT network, where wireless-powered relays are deployed between the hybrid access point (HAP) and batteryless IoT devices to assist the uplink information transmission from the devices to the HAP. In particular, the HAP first exploits energy beamforming to efficiently transmit radio frequency (RF) signals to transfer energy to the relays and as the incident signals to enable the information backscattering of batteryless IoT devices. Then, each relay uses the harvested energy to forward the decoded signals from its corresponding batteryless IoT device to the HAP, where the maximum-ratio combing is used for further performance improvement. To maximize the network sum-rate, the joint optimization of energy beamforming vectors at the HAP, network time scheduling, power allocation at the relays, and relection coefficient at the users is investigated. As the formulated problem is non-convex, we propose an alternating optimization algorithm with the variable substitution and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques to solve it efficiently. Specifically, we prove that the obtained energy beamforming matrices are always rank-one. Numerical results show that compared to the benchmark schemes, the proposed scheme can achieve a significant sum-rate gain.

Aiming at the problem of non-line of sight (NLOS) signal recognition for Ultra Wide Band (UWB) positioning, we utilize the concepts of Neural Network Clustering and Neural Network Pattern Recognition. We propose a classification algorithm based on self-organizing feature mapping (SOM) neural network batch processing, and a recognition algorithm based on convolutional neural network (CNN). By assigning different weights to learning, training and testing parts in the data set of UWB location signals with given known patterns, a strong NLOS signal recognizer is trained to minimize the recognition error rate. Finally, the proposed NLOS signal recognition algorithm is verified using data sets from real scenarios. The test results show that the proposed algorithm can solve the problem of UWB NLOS signal recognition under strong signal interference. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithm is significantly more effective compared with other algorithms.

The mean, median, and mode are usually calculated from univariate observations as the most basic representative values of a random variable. To measure the spread of the distribution, the standard deviation, interquartile range, and modal interval are also calculated. When we analyze continuous relations between a pair of random variables from bivariate observations, regression analysis is often used. By minimizing appropriate costs evaluating regression errors, we estimate the conditional mean, median, and mode. The conditional standard deviation can be estimated if the bivariate observations are obtained from a Gaussian process. Moreover, the conditional interquartile range can be calculated for various distributions by the quantile regression that estimates any conditional quantile (percentile). Meanwhile, the study of the modal interval regression is relatively new, and spline regression models, known as flexible models having the optimality on the smoothness for bivariate data, are not yet used. In this paper, we propose a modal interval regression method based on spline quantile regression. The proposed method consists of two steps. In the first step, we divide the bivariate observations into bins for one random variable, then detect the modal interval for the other random variable as the lower and upper quantiles in each bin. In the second step, we estimate the conditional modal interval by constructing both lower and upper quantile curves as spline functions. By using the spline quantile regression, the proposed method is widely applicable to various distributions and formulated as a convex optimization problem on the coefficient vectors of the lower and upper spline functions. Extensive experiments, including settings of the bin width, the smoothing parameter and weights in the cost function, show the effectiveness of the proposed modal interval regression in terms of accuracy and visual shape for synthetic data generated from various distributions. Experiments for real-world meteorological data also demonstrate a good performance of the proposed method.

Recent developments in engineering applications of stochastic resonance have expanded to various fields, especially biomedicine. Deterministic chaos generates a phenomenon known as chaotic resonance, which is similar to stochastic resonance. However, engineering applications of chaotic resonance are limited owing to the problems in controlling chaos, despite its uniquely high sensitivity to weak signal responses. To tackle these problems, a previous study proposed “reduced region of orbit” (RRO) feedback methods, which cause chaotic resonance using external feedback signals. However, this evaluation was conducted under noise-free conditions. In actual environments, background noise and measurement errors are inevitable in the estimation of RRO feedback strength; therefore, their impact must be elucidated for the application of RRO feedback methods. In this study, we evaluated the chaotic resonance induced by the RRO feedback method in chaotic neural systems in the presence of stochastic noise. Specifically, we focused on the chaotic resonance induced by RRO feedback signals in a neural system composed of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, a typical neural system wherein chaotic resonance is observed in the presence of additive noise and feedback signals including the measurement error (called contaminant noise). It was found that for a relatively small noise strength, both types of noise commonly degenerated the degree of synchronization in chaotic resonance induced by RRO feedback signals, although these characteristics were significantly different. In contrast, chaos-chaos intermittency synchronization was observed for a relatively high noise strength owing to the noise-induced attractor merging bifurcation for both types of noise. In practical neural systems, the influence of noise is unavoidable; therefore, this study highlighted the importance of the countermeasures for noise in the application of chaotic resonance and utilization of noise-induced attractor merging bifurcation.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end two-branch feature attention network. The network is mainly used for single image dehazing. The network consists of two branches, we call it CAA-Net: 1) A U-NET network composed of different-level feature fusion based on attention (FEPA) structure and residual dense block (RDB). In order to make full use of all the hierarchical features of the image, we use RDB. RDB contains dense connected layers and local feature fusion with local residual learning. We also propose a structure which called FEPA.FEPA structure could retain the information of shallow layer and transfer it to the deep layer. FEPA is composed of serveral feature attention modules (FPA). FPA combines local residual learning with channel attention mechanism and pixel attention mechanism, and could extract features from different channels and image pixels. 2) A network composed of several different levels of FEPA structures. The network could make feature weights learn from FPA adaptively, and give more weight to important features. The final output result of CAA-Net is the combination of all branch prediction results. Experimental results show that the CAA-Net proposed by us surpasses the most advanced algorithms before for single image dehazing.

In this letter, we consider a global stabilization problem for a class of feedforward systems by an event-triggered control. This is an extended work of [10] in a way that there are uncertain feedforward nonlinearity and time-varying input delay in the system. First, we show that the considered system is globally asymptotically stabilized by a proposed event-triggered controller with a gain-scaling factor. Then, we also show that the interexecution times can be enlarged by adjusting a gain-scaling factor. A simulation example is given for illustration.

To improve the performance of underwater acoustic communications, this letter proposes a polar coding scheme with adaptive channel equalization, which can reduce the amount of feedback information. Furthermore, a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) mechanism is provided to mitigate the impact of estimation errors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the turbo equalization in bit error rate. Computational complexity analysis is also provided for comparison.

Constructing accurate similarity graph is an important process in graph-based clustering. However, traditional methods have three drawbacks, such as the inaccuracy of the similarity graph, the vulnerability to noise and outliers, and the need for additional discretization process. In order to eliminate these limitations, an entropy regularized unsupervised clustering based on maximum correntropy criterion and adaptive neighbors (ERMCC) is proposed. 1) Combining information entropy and adaptive neighbors to solve the trivial similarity distributions. And we introduce l0-norm and spectral embedding to construct similarity graph with sparsity and strong segmentation ability. 2) Reducing the negative impact of non-Gaussian noise by reconstructing the error using correntropy. 3) The prediction label vector is directly obtained by calculating the sparse strongly connected components of the similarity graph Z, which avoids additional discretization process. Experiments are conducted on six typical datasets and the results showed the effectiveness of the method.

This paper proposes a robust optimization model for probabilistic protection under uncertain capacity demands to minimize the total required capacity against multiple simultaneous failures of physical machines. The proposed model determines both primary and backup virtual machine allocations simultaneously under the probabilistic protection guarantee. To express the uncertainty of capacity demands, we introduce an uncertainty set that considers the upper bound of the total demand and the upper and lower bounds of each demand. The robust optimization technique is applied to the optimization model to deal with two uncertainties: failure event and capacity demand. With this technique, the model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. To solve larger sized problems, a simulated annealing (SA) heuristic is introduced. In SA, we obtain the capacity demands by solving maximum flow problems. Numerical results show that our proposed model reduces the total required capacity compared with the conventional model by determining both primary and backup virtual machine allocations simultaneously. We also compare the results of MILP, SA, and a baseline greedy algorithm. For a larger sized problem, we obtain approximate solutions in a practical time by using SA and the greedy algorithm.

Recently, Linux Container has been the de-facto standard for a cloud system, enabling cloud providers to create a virtual environment in a much more scaled manner. However, configuring container networks remains immature and requires automatic verification for efficient cloud management. We propose Verikube, which utilizes a novel graph structure representing policies to reduce memory consumption and accelerate verification. Moreover, unlike existing works, Verikube is compatible with the complex semantics of Cilium Policy which a cloud adopts from its advantage of performance. Our evaluation results show that Verikube performs at least seven times better for memory efficiency, at least 1.5 times faster for data structure management, and 20K times better for verification.

The issue of copying values or references has historically been studied for managing memory objects, especially in distributed systems. In this paper, we explore a new topic on copying values v.s. references, for memory page compaction on virtualized systems. Memory page compaction moves target physical pages to a contiguous memory region at the operating system kernel level to create huge pages. Memory virtualization provides an opportunity to perform memory page compaction by copying the references of the physical pages. That is, instead of copying pages' values, we can move guest physical pages by changing the mappings of guest-physical to machine-physical pages. The goal of this paper is a quantitative comparison between value- and reference-based memory page compaction. To do so, we developed a software mechanism that achieves memory page compaction by appropriately updating the references of guest-physical pages. We prototyped the mechanism on Linux 4.19.29 and the experimental results show that the prototype's page compaction is up to 78% faster and achieves up to 17% higher performance on the memory-intensive real-world applications as compared to the default value-copy compaction scheme.

This letter provides a direct construction of binary even-length Z-complementary pairs. To date, the maximum zero correlation zone ratio of Type-I Z-complementary pairs has reached 6/7, but no direct construction of Z-complementary pairs can achieve the zero correlation zone ratio of 6/7. In this letter, based on Boolean function, we give a direct construction of binary even-length Z-complementary pairs with zero correlation zone ratio 6/7. The length of constructed Z-complementary pairs is 2m+3 + 2m + 2+2m+1 and the width of zero correlation zone is 2m+3 + 2m+2.

It has been widely recognized that in compressed sensing, many restricted isometry property (RIP) conditions can be easily obtained by using the null space property (NSP) with its null space constant (NSC) 0<θ≤1 to construct a contradicted method for sparse signal recovery. However, the traditional NSP with θ=1 will lead to conservative RIP conditions. In this paper, we extend the NSP with 0<θ<1 to a scale NSP, which uses a factor τ to scale down all vectors belonged to the Null space of a sensing matrix. Following the popular proof procedure and using the scale NSP, we establish more relaxed RIP conditions with the scale factor τ, which guarantee the bounded approximation recovery of all sparse signals in the bounded noisy through the constrained l1 minimization. An application verifies the advantages of the scale factor in the number of measurements.

Recently, most signal processing algorithms have been developed with floating-point arithmetic, while the fixed-point arithmetic is more popular with most commercial devices and low-power real-time applications which are implemented on embedded/ASIC/FPGA systems. Therefore, the optimal Floating-point to Fixed-point Conversion (FFC) methodology is a promising solution. In this paper, we propose the FFC consisting of signal grouping technique and simulation-based word length optimization. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique, simulations are carried out and hardware co-simulation on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) platform have been applied to complex Digital Signal Processing (DSP) algorithms: Linear Time Invariant (LTI) systems, multi-mode Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) circuit for IEEE 802.11 ax WLAN Devices and the calibration algorithm of gain and clock skew in Time-Interleaved ADC (TI-ADC) using Adaptive Noise Canceller (ANC). The results show that the proposed technique can reduce the hardware cost about 30% while being able to maintain its speed and reliability.

A path loss prediction formula for IoT (Internet of Things) wireless communication close to ceiling beams in the 920MHz band is presented. In first step of our investigation, we conduct simulations using the FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) method and propagation tests close to a beam on the ceiling of a concrete building. In the second step, we derive a path loss prediction formula from the simulation results by using the FDTD method, by dividing into three regions of LoS (line-of-sight) situation, situation in the vicinity of the beam, and NLoS (non-line-of-sight) situation, depending on the positional relationship between the beam and transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) antennas. For each condition, the prediction formula is expressed by a relatively simple form as a function of height of the antennas with respect to the beam bottom. Thus, the prediction formula is very useful for the wireless site planning for the IoT wireless devices set close to concrete beam ceiling.

For formulating Quadratic Knapsack Problems (QKPs) into the form of Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO), it is necessary to introduce an integer variable, which converts and incorporates the knapsack capacity constraint into the overall energy function. In QUBO, this integer variable is encoded with auxiliary binary variables, and the encoding method used for it affects the behavior of Simulated Annealing (SA) significantly. For improving the efficiency of SA for QKP instances, this paper first visualized and analyzed their annealing processes encoded by conventional binary and unary encoding methods. Based on this analysis, we proposed a novel hybrid encoding (HE), getting the best of both worlds. The proposed HE obtained feasible solutions in the evaluation, outperforming the others in small- and medium-scale models.

Edge computing, which has been gaining attention in recent years, has many advantages, such as reducing the load on the cloud, not being affected by the communication environment, and providing excellent security. Therefore, many researchers have attempted to implement neural networks, which are representative of machine learning in edge computing. Neural networks can be divided into inference and learning parts; however, there has been little research on implementing the learning component in edge computing in contrast to the inference part. This is because learning requires more memory and computation than inference, easily exceeding the limit of resources available for edge computing. To overcome this problem, this research focuses on the optimizer, which is the heart of learning. In this paper, we introduce our new optimizer, hardware-oriented logarithmic momentum estimation (Holmes), which incorporates new perspectives not found in existing optimizers in terms of characteristics and strengths of hardware. The performance of Holmes was evaluated by comparing it with other optimizers with respect to learning progress and convergence speed. Important aspects of hardware implementation, such as memory and operation requirements are also discussed. The results show that Holmes is a good match for edge computing with relatively low resource requirements and fast learning convergence. Holmes will help create an era in which advanced machine learning can be realized on edge computing.