In this letter, a pilot structure and an efficient algorithm for downlink synchronization and cell searching in OFDM-based cellular systems are proposed. The pilots, randomly allocated in the frequency domain, allow us to minimize inter-cell interference (ICI) as well as to increase cell searching capability, estimation range of integer carrier frequency offset (CFO), and estimation accuracy of symbol timing offset (STO). The proposed low-complexity joint algorithm for integer CFO estimation, cell searching, and downlink detection is robust to ICI, multipath channel, STO and fine CFO.

This paper presents a novel analytical approach to evaluate the signaling load of Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6). Previous analytical approaches for IP mobility management have not provided a complete and general framework for the performance analysis; no consideration of either periodic binding refresh cost or extra packet tunneling cost from the viewpoint of IP mobility management, and no in-depth investigation with respect to various system parameters. In this paper, according to the proposed analytical approach, we derive the location update costs (i.e., the sum of binding update costs and binding refresh costs), packet tunneling costs, inside-domain signaling costs, outside-domain signaling costs, and total signaling costs, which are generated by a mobile node (MN) during its average domain residence time in case MIPv6 or HMIPv6 is deployed under the same network architecture, respectively. Moreover, based on these derived costs, we evaluate the impacts of various system parameters on the signaling costs generated by an MN in MIPv6 and HMIPv6. The aim of this paper is not to determine which protocol performs better, but evaluate the performance that can be expected for each protocol under the various conditions, broaden our deep understanding of the various parameters that may influence the performance, and provide insight for the deployment of the two protocols.

XML query processing is one of the most active areas of database research. Although the main focus of past research has been the processing of structural XML queries, there are growing demands for a full-text search for XML documents. In this paper, we propose XICS (XML Indices for Content and Structural search), which aims at high-speed processing of both full-text and structural queries in XML documents. An important design principle of our indices is the use of a B+-tree. To represent the structural information of XML trees, each node in the XML tree is labeled with an identifier. The identifier contains an integer number representing the path information from the root node. XICS consist of two types of indices, the COB-tree (COntent B+-tree) and the STB-tree (STructure B+-tree). The search keys of the COB-tree are a pair of text fragments in the XML document and the identifiers of the leaf nodes that contain the text, whereas the search keys of the STB-tree are the node identifiers. By using a node identifier in the search keys, we can retrieve only the entries that match the path information in the query. The STB-tree can filter nodes using structural conditions in queries, while the COB-tree can filter nodes using text conditions. We have implemented a COB-tree and an STB-tree using GiST and examined index size and query processing time. Our experimental results show the efficiency of XICS in query processing.

The newest video coding standard called H.264 provides considerable performance improvement over a wide range of bit rates and video resolutions compared to previous standards. However, these features result in an extraordinary increase in encoder complexity, mainly regarding to mode decision and multiple reference frame motion estimation (ME). This letter presents two algorithms to reduce the computational complexity caused by motion estimation. The adaptive search range decision method determines the search range size according to the motion vector predictor dynamically and the early termination scheme defines a criterion to early terminate the search processing for multiple reference frames. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms provide significant improvement of coding speed with negligible objective quality degradation compared to the fast motion estimation algorithms adopted by reference software.

Phonetic string search of written text is an important topic in Information Retrieval. While most of the previous methods convert a string into intermediate codes with phonetic transformation rules, this paper proposes a novel algorithm to segment two phonetic strings into syllables and find the optimal pairing of the corresponding syllables to calculate their similarity score. The experiment shows that this method is very effective and flexible. It can be easily adapted to different datasets and achieves optimal performance on average.

Service registration and discovery are functionalities central to any service-oriented architecture, and they are often provided by centralized entities in today's systems. However, there are advantages of scalability, robustness, as well as distribution of control and cost by further decentralization of these functionalities to all the participants in the system. Peer-to-peer networks are great enablers toward this goal as they are designed to be scalable and autonomic; redundancy and automatic reconfiguarion are built into these systems, enabling peers to form and maintain the network autonomously. This article describes a fully decentralized service directory infrastructure built on top of the peer-to-peer protocol Chord. Service registration is performed implicitly by embedding semantic information into the peer identifiers, grouping peers by service categories and forming islands on the ring topology. Service discovery is performed by sending queries and anycast messages to peers registered in the appropriate islands. The routing protocol is further modified to take advantage of the island topology, with reputation mechanism and multi-path routing implemented to avoid the threat of misbehaving peers dropping transit messages in the system. Simulations were performed to assess the efficacy of both the new routing scheme and misbehavior avoidance.

In this paper, we propose a new Interconnect Length Distribution (ILD) model to evaluate X architecture. X architecture uses 45-wire orientations in addition to 90-wire orientations, which contributes to reduce the total wire length and the number of vias. In this paper, we evaluated interconnect length distribution of diagonal (45orientations) and all-directional wiring. The average length and the longest length of interconnect are estimated, and 18% reduction in power consumption and 17% improvement in clock frequency can be obtained by the diagonal wiring in the experimental results. The all-directional wiring does not have large advantage as compared the diagonal wiring.

In this paper, we propose a fast multi-resolution block matching algorithm with three resolution levels (upper, middle, and lower levels) for multiple-frame motion estimation (MFME). The main concept of the algorithm is to perform a fast search while maintaining a PSNR performance similar to a full search block matching algorithm (FSBMA). The algorithm combines motion vector prediction using the spatial correlation of motion vectors and a multiple candidate search based on a multi-resolution search. To further reduce the computational complexity, we propose two temporal reduction schemes. To reduce the number of previous reference frames to be processed, the first scheme is applied to the upper level by using the information obtained from the search results of the spatio-temporally adjacent macroblocks (MBs) and the result from the current MB in the middle level of the first reference frame. The other scheme is applied to the lower level by using statistical information. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm guarantees an average PSNR loss of less than 0.23 dB with dramatically reduced computational complexity as compared to the FSBMA. In particular, for sequences with fast motion or frame skipping, the proposed method provides a more prominent PSNR performance than those of existing fast schemes with a comparable computational complexity.

Designing a software architecture that satisfies multiple quality requirements is a difficult undertaking. This is mainly due to the fact that architects must be able to explore a broad range of architectural choices and analyze tradeoffs among them in light of multiple quality requirements. As the size and complexity of the system increase, architectural design space to be explored and analyzed becomes more complex. In order to systematically manage the complexity, this paper proposes a method that guides architects to explore and analyze architectural decisions in a top-down manner. In the method, architectural decisions that have global impacts on given quality requirements are first explored and analyzed and those that have local impacts are then taken into account in the context of the decisions made in the previous step. This approach can cope with the complexity of large-scale architectural design systematically, as architectural decisions are analyzed and made following the abstraction hierarchy of quality requirements. To illustrate the concepts and applicability of the proposed method, we have applied this method to the architectural design of the computer used for the continuous casting process by an iron and steel manufacturer.

We propose a multiple dwell serial search (MDSS) code acquisition for optical code-division multiple-access (O-CDMA) systems and theoretically analyze its performance. The search/lock strategy (SLS) is used as verification scheme for the multiple dwell detector. The operation of SLS is modeled by finite Markov chain to analyze the performance of the proposed system. Effect of system parameters, such as number of users, threshold and mean photon count per chip, on the performance of the proposed system is investigated. The theoretical result shows that the performance of the proposed system is less sensitive to parameter settings than the conventional single dwell serial search (SDSS) code acquisition system is. In addition, the proposed MDSS code acquisition system offers shorter mean acquisition time than that of conventional SDSS system.

There are several optimization techniques available for improving rendering speed of direct volume rendering. An acceleration method using the hierarchical min-max map requires little preprocessing and data storage while preserving image quality. However, this method introduces computational overhead because of unnecessary comparison and level shift between blocks. In this paper, we propose an efficient space-leaping method using optimal-sized blocks. To determine the size of blocks, our method partitions an image plane into several uniform grids and computes the minimum and the maximum depth values for each grid. We acquire optimal block sets suitable for individual rays from these values. Experimental results show that our method reduces rendering time when compared with the previous min-max octree method.

This paper shows a design method for a sequential circuit by using a Look-Up Table (LUT) ring. The method consists of two steps: The first step partitions the outputs into groups. The second step realizes them by LUT cascades, and allocates the cells of the cascades into the memory. The system automatically finds a fast implementation by maximally utilizing available memory. With the presented algorithm, we can easily design sequential circuits satisfying given specifications. The paper also compares the LUT ring with logic simulator to realize sequential circuits: the LUT ring is 25 to 237 times faster than a logic simulator that uses the same amount of memory.

As an enhancement of the state-of-the-art solutions, a high-throughput architecture of a decoder for structured LDPC codes is presented in this paper. Thanks to the peculiar code definition and to the envisaged architecture featuring memory paging, the decoder is very flexible, and the support of different code rates is achieved with no significant hardware overhead. A top-down design flow of a real decoder is reported, starting from the analysis of the system performance in finite-precision arithmetic, up to the VLSI implementation details of the elementary modules. The synthesis of the whole decoder on 0.18µm standard cells CMOS technology showed remarkable performances: small implementation loss (0.2dB down to BER = 10-8), low latency (less than 6.0µs), high useful throughput (up to 940Mbps) and low complexity (about 375 Kgates).

Directory-based cache coherence schemes are commonly used in large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors, but most of them rely on heuristics to avoid large hardware requirements. We proposed using physical address mapping on directories to significantly reduce directory size needed. This approach allows the size of directory to grow as O(cn log2 n) as in optimal pointer-based directory schemes [11], where n is the number of nodes in the system and c is the number of cache lines in each cache memory. Performance aspects of the proposed scheme are studied in detail using simulation.

Recently, Juang proposed an efficient password authenticated key agreement scheme using smart cards for the multi-server architecture. Juang's scheme was intended to provide mutual authentication and session key agreement. Herein, we show that Juang's scheme is vulnerable to a privileged insider's attack and is not easily reparable. Furthermore, it does not provide forward secrecy and the user eviction mechanism.

In this paper, we propose a parametric model checking algorithm for a subclass of Timed Automata called Parametric Time-Interval Automata (PTIA). In a PTIA, we can specify upper- and lower-bounds of the execution time (time-interval) of each transition using parameter variables. The proposed algorithm takes two inputs, a model described in a PTIA and a property described in a PTIA accepting all invalid infinite/finite runs (called a never claim), or valid finite runs of the model. In the proposed algorithm, firstly we determinize and complement the given property PTIA if it accepts valid finite runs. Secondly, we accelerate the given model, that is, we regard all the actions that are not appeared in the given property PTIA as invisible actions and eliminate them from the model while preserving the set of visible traces and their timings. Thirdly, we construct a parallel composition of the model and the property PTIAs which is accepting all invalid runs that are accepted by the model. Finally, we perform the extension of Double Depth First Search (DDFS), which is used in the automata-theoretic approach to Linear-time Temporal Logic (LTL) model checking, to derive the weakest parameter condition in order that the given model never executes the invalid runs specified by the given property.

We propose a system that enables us to gather hundreds of images related to one set of keywords provided by a user from the World Wide Web. The system is called Image Collector II. The Image Collector, which we proposed previously, can gather only one or two hundreds of images. We propose the two following improvements on our previous system in terms of the number of gathered images and their precision: (1) We extract some words appearing with high frequency from all HTML files in which output images are embedded in an initial image gathering, and using them as keywords, we carry out a second image gathering. Through this process, we can obtain hundreds of images for one set of keywords. (2) The more images we gather, the more the precision of gathered images decreases. To improve the precision, we introduce word vectors of HTML files embedding images into the image selecting process in addition to image feature vectors.

The scalability of routing protocol has been considered as a key issue in large-scaled wavelength routed networks. Hierarchical routing scales well by yielding enormous reductions in routing table length, but it also increases path length. This increased path length in wavelength-routed networks leads to increased blocking probability because longer paths tend to have less free wavelength channels. However, if the routes assigned to longer paths have greater wavelength resources, we can expect that the blocking probability will not increase. In this paper, we propose a distributed node-clustering method that maximizes the number of lightpaths between nodes. The key idea behind our method is to construct node-clusters that have much greater wavelength resources from the ingress border nodes to the egress border nodes, which increases the wavelength resources on the routes of lightpaths between nodes. We evaluate the blocking probability for lightpath requests and the maximum table length in simulation experiments. We find that the method we propose significantly reduces the table length, while the blocking probability is almost the same as that without clustering.

As a representative of the linear discriminant analysis, the Fisher method is most widely used in practice and it is very effective in two-class classification. However, when it is expanded to a multi-class classification problem, the precision of its discrimination may become worse. A main reason is an occurrence of overlapped distributions on the discriminant space built by Fisher criterion. In order to take such overlaps among classes into consideration, our approach builds a new discriminant space by hierarchically classifying the overlapped classes. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical discriminant analysis for texture classification. We divide the discriminant space into subspaces by recursively grouping the overlapped classes. In the experiment, texture images from many classes are classified based on the proposed method. We show the outstanding result compared with the conventional Fisher method.

This paper presents Dynamic Attention Map by Ising model for face detection. In general, a face detector can not know where faces there are and how many faces there are in advance. Therefore, the face detector must search the whole regions on the image and requires much computational time. To speed up the search, the information obtained at previous search points should be used effectively. In order to use the likelihood of face obtained at previous search points effectively, Ising model is adopted to face detection. Ising model has the two-state spins; "up" and "down". The state of a spin is updated by depending on the neighboring spins and an external magnetic field. Ising spins are assigned to "face" and "non-face" states of face detection. In addition, the measured likelihood of face is integrated into the energy function of Ising model as the external magnetic field. It is confirmed that face candidates would be reduced effectively by spin flip dynamics. To improve the search performance further, the single level Ising search method is extended to the multilevel Ising search. The interactions between two layers which are characterized by the renormalization group method is used to reduce the face candidates. The effectiveness of the multilevel Ising search method is also confirmed by the comparison with the single level Ising search method.