This paper proposes aspiration controls which restrains aspiration branches and keeps the original tabu-based searching by considering past and/or (predicted) future searching profiles. For implementation of the aspiration control we employ not only the short-term and long-term memory but also future memory which is first introduced in this paper as a new concept in the tabu search field. The tabu search with the aspiration control is also parallelized. Moreover two types of parallel cooperative searching scheme are proposed. Through computational experiment, we observe efficiency of our approach comparing to the traditional ones. Especially, we find that cooperative searching has possibility to improve the solution quality very well.

This paper presents the fast cell search time performance based on laboratory and field experiments of a 2-step cell search algorithm that uses scrambling code masking for inter-cell asynchronous wideband DS-CDMA (W-CDMA) mobile radio. The scrambling code is masked at different time positions during each scrambling period on the forward-link common control channel (CCH) to detect the scrambling code timing at the mobile receiver. Experiments were conducted using the CCH-to-dedicated traffic channel (DTCH) power ratio, R of 3 dB, 10 DTCHs, and 16 scrambling codes in a single-cell and two-cell models. The field experimental results show that the cell search time of about 600 msec was achieved in vehicular environments at the detection probability of 90% and the average received Eb/N0 (N0 is the background noise without interference) of 13-15 dB for DTCH, even in the worst case scenario when the received signal power ratios of the CCH from two cell sites were 0 dB. The cell search time that was achieved with the 3-step cell search algorithm previously proposed by the authors is estimated from the experimental results; the cell search can be accomplished within about 720 msec at a probability of 96% for 512 scrambling codes and 16 scrambling code groups.

In this paper, visualized sound retrieval and categorization methods using a feature-based image search engine were evaluated aiming at efficient video scene query. Color-coded patterns of the sound spectrogram are adopted as the visualized sound index. Sound categorization experiments were conducted using visualized sound databases including speech, bird song, musical sounds, insect chirping, and the sound-track of sports video. The results of the retrieval experiments show that the simple feature-based image search engine can be effectively used for visualized sound retrieval and categorization. The results of categorization experiments involving humans show that after brief training humans can at least do rough categorization. These results suggest that using visualized sound can be effective method for an efficient video scene query.

In order that they fully support human activities, new network services and applications are overwhelming conventional ones, such as telephony, facsimile, and telegraph. Demands for digital networks are exploding, not only in terms of quantity but also quality. Nobody can predict where these demands will lead. Traffic engineering, which is impossible in pure Internet protocol (IP) -based networks, is recognized as being indispensable for quality of service (QoS) control. It includes guaranteed services in terms of bandwidth, delay, delay variation (jitter), and service protection. The "engineered tunnel" through IP network supports virtual private networks (VPNs) and allows us to develop voice-over-IP (VoIP), teleconferencing and other secure private network services. This paper proposes the "photonic router" which makes use of wavelength-based networks for signal routing. IP packets having the same destination are bundled into a wavelength path. Interchange nodes along the path route control path routing on the basis of wavelength information, not on IP headers, which can not be read or processed with current optical techniques. In short, wavelength path routing offers "cut-through" in the photonic layer. This paper shows its feasibility by describing the combination of an optical cross-connect, payload assembler/disassembler, label controller, and IP router. Optical cross-connect systems, which are now being intensively studied worldwide, are deemed to be key equipment for a wavelength-path network with centralized control system. This paper proposes to apply the cross-connect to an IP network with distributed autonomous control.

Even in today's industries that are predominated by solid-state switching devices, electromechanical devices with electrical contacts are still widely used for switching and/or conveying electrical signals and power. In this paper, some interesting topics in the investigation of electrical contacts, which were selected mainly from those presented at recently held international conferences or submitted to the related Transactions of IEEE and IEICE, are introduced. Specifically, some topics related to investigation regarding contact materials, new techniques for evaluating electrical contact phenomena, new understanding of the contact phenomena, and new applications of electrical contacts are briefly explained.

Some experimental results on the contact phenomena that have been observed with electrical contacts operated to break an inductive DC load current in nitrogen atmosphere and in air (laboratory atmosphere) are presented. When Ag, Pd and Cu contacts were operated to break an inductive DC load current in the range of 1.0 A to 3.0 A in nitrogen atmosphere, more stable contact resistance characteristics were obtained, as compared to the case where operated in air, or at least the occurrence of unstableness and increase in contact resistance was delayed. The arc duration in nitrogen atmosphere became shorter in general than in air, especially with the Pd and Cu contacts. Voltage waveforms of arc discharges in the Ag and Pd contacts operated in nitrogen atmosphere showed a relatively clear step-like transition from the metallic phase to the gaseous phase as compared to the case where operated in air, while the Cu arcs did not show such significant differences due to the surrounding atmosphere. Although any apparent differences on the contact surface conditions in connection with the surrounding atmosphere were not clearly observed after the switching operations, the anode mass change characteristics were found to be more significantly affected by the difference of surrounding atmospheres than the cathode mass changes. The obtained experimental results suggest that the difference in the surrounding atmosphere introduce some difference in the anode surface morphology, possibly through the deposition of arc products in different deposition patterns, which will then result in differences in the contact resistance characteristics.

In this paper, the distributions of two spectral intensities along the axis of an arc column of the breaking arc are measured by using a combination of a CCD color camera and an additional filter, and arc temperature and metal-vapor quantity are calculated, when copper electrodes interrupt circuits of dc 50 V/3.3 A and 5.0 A. As results; The spectral intensities of excited copper atoms are the strongest near the cathode and become weaker with distance from the cathode in the small number of breaking arcs. The spectral intensities become strong near the anode in the large number of breaking arcs. The average arc temperature in the cross-section of an arc column is high near both the cathode and the anode, and the temperature distribution in the cross-section of the arc column is high at the axis of the arc column, and the arc temperature along the axis of the arc column is high near both the cathode and the anode. The metal-vapor quantity is low near both the cathode and the anode, and it is much at the center of the arc column.

Sticking is one of dominant characteristics of reliability in relays for medium current loads from several amperes to several dozen amperes, which are used for relays for automobiles, industrial control units or power supplies of household electrical appliances. Correlations between the release failures due to sticking and contact characteristics such as arc discharges, material parameters and design factors in relays have never been always made clear. This puts difficulty in the way of reasonable development of contact materials and rational design of relays. So, dependence of electrical load conditions on sticking characteristics are investigated, using the Ag-CdO contacts which have had high practical use to relays for medium current loads. Furthermore, relationship among the sticking characteristics, arc discharge characteristics and contact surface properties after operations are studied. Mechanism of sticking is considered on the basis of those data. The results are as follows: (1) Sticking phenomenon occurs intermittently from initial operations and lasts to the end. (2) The µ + 2 σ value (the sum of the mean value and the integral multiple of the standard deviation of sticking force) increases in proportion to the circuit current. On the other hand, it has the maximum value at a circuit voltage, slightly less than the minimum arc voltage. (3) Factors causing the sticking are considered to be divided into direct factors and its root factors. It is considered that a dominant direct factor is welding, and that its root factor is bridge or welding by Joule's heat. On the other hand, the sticking force becomes rather lower as the circuit voltage increases, in the circuit voltage range where regular arc discharge occurs.

A Rayleigh lidar (laser radar) system was developed and is now working well for temperature observations of the middle atmosphere at Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska (65.1 N, 147.5 W). A comparison of lidar data and balloon sonde data showed good agreement in overlapped altitudes. The atmospheric fluctuations are detected in the temperature profiles obtained by the Rayleigh lidar and these are useful for the study of gravity waves. A Rayleigh Doppler lidar for wind measurements of the middle atmosphere is under the phase of development. The expected accuracy in measurements of horizontal winds up to an altitude of 60 km is smaller than 6 m/s in 2 hours observation. The system will be operated at Poker Flat after the completion of development. The combination of these lidars and radars installed at Poker Flat, give us chances of simultaneous observations of the structure and dynamics of the atmosphere in broad range of altitudes. Here, we give descriptions of the Rayleigh lidar and the Rayleigh Doppler lidar for the observations of the Arctic middle atmosphere at Poker Flat.

In this paper, we present our work on the design of a new FPGA architecture targeted for high-performance bit-serial pipeline datapath. Bit-parallel systems require large amount of routing resource which is especially critical in using FPGAs. Their device utilization and operation frequency become low because of large routing penalty. Whereas bit-serial circuits are very efficient in routing, therefore are able to achieve a very high logic utilization. Our proposed FPGA architecture is designed taking into account the structure of bit-serial circuits to optimize the logic and routing architecture. Our FPGA guarantees near 100% logic utilization with a straightforward place and route tool due to high routability of bit-serial circuits and simple routing interconnect architecture. The FPGA chip core which we designed consists of around 200k transistors on 3.5 mm square substrate using 0.5 µm 2-metal CMOS process technology.

In order to serve traffic hot spots, the hierarchical cellular systems or the hybrid TDMA/CDMA have been proposed, recently. In order to depress the multi-user interference and increase capacity, the forward link power control strategy is adopted in the macrocell/microcell hierarchical cellular system using code division multiple access (CDMA). Its effects are estimated in this paper. Especially, the impact of -th distance power control laws on the forward link outage probability and capacity plane for the hierarchical cellular system are investigated. The coverage area user capacity of the overlaid macrocell/microcell cellular system is obtained. The numerical results and discussions with previous published results are presented in detail.

This paper proposes a fast target cell search algorithm used during intermittent reception in the idle mode of a mobile station (MS) for inter-cell asynchronous W-CDMA mobile radio. In the proposed scheme, since the base station (BS) informs a MS of the relative average received timing differences between the scrambling code of its BS and those of the surrounding BSs in addition to the scrambling codes, the MS only has to search over the restricted timing duration for the informed scrambling codes. Therefore, the target cell search (i.e., in which the number of candidate cells is limited) can be achieved as fast as in inter-cell synchronous systems. A computer simulation demonstrates that the target cell search time per one super frame (= 720 msec) at the cell detection probability of 95% is accomplished within 5.9 msec (this corresponds to the intermittent time ratio required for the target cell search to become 0.82%), when the transmit power ratios of the common pilot channel (CPICH) and common control physical channel (CCPCH) required for cell search to a dedicated traffic channel (DTCH) are 3 and 6 dB, respectively. In this simulation, the average power delay profile was generated by averaging the instantaneous ones (it was coherently accumulated pilot signal over a 512-chip duration (= 125 µsec) using 4 correlators) over a period of three super frames for 19 target cell-site candidates using the search window with a 10-chip duration (= 2.4 µsec).

In 1996, Chiu and Hsu proposed a multi-role-based access control (MRBAC) policy. Nevertheless, the Chiu-Hsu scheme can be further enforced by role list, union, and intersection (i. e. containment) to deal with the problems regarding the MRBAC and the object role with different security ranks. The author presents an improvement of the Chiu-Hsu scheme using more detailed list structure. This improvement offers some significant advantages.

We consider the problem of placing resources in a distributed computing system so that certain performance requirements may be met while minimizing the number of resource copies needed. Resources include special I/O processors, expensive peripheral devices, or such software modules as compilers, library routines, and data files. Due to the delay in accessing each of these resources, system performance degrades as the distance between each processor and its nearest resource copy increases. Thus, every processor must be within a given distance k1 of at least one resource copy, which is called the k-bounded placement problem. The structure of a distributed computing system is represented by a graph. The k-bounded placement problem is first transformed into the problem of finding smallest k-dominating sets in a graph. Searching for smallest k-dominating sets is formulated as a state-space search problem. We derive heuristic information to speed up the search, which is then used to solve the problem with the well-known A* algorithm. An illustrative example and some experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic search.

In order to realize universal service access of mobile users on the global telecommunication environment, we have to consider the scalable networking architecute based on the distributed object computing technologies. In this paper, we apply TINA to the promising networking architecture, and propose TINA-based scalable model for realizing personal mobility service, which especially focuses on making access to telecommunication services from any legacy systems that do not support such the new environment, using a downloadable module in an end terminal, as well as considering load balance of a whole system. Our proposed model also focuses on exchanging personal infomation of mobile users between different administrative domains, by separating the already-specified user profile information objects into two parts, which are the domain-common part and domain-specific part, and propose secure exchange procedure.

We propose a rough classification system using Hierarchical Learning Vector Quantization (HLVQ) for large scale classification problems which involve many categories. HLVQ of proposed system divides categories hierarchically in the feature space, makes a tree and multiplies the nodes down the hierarchy. The feature space is divided by a few codebook vectors in each layer. The adjacent feature spaces overlap at the borders. HLVQ classification is both speedy and accurate due to the hierarchical architecture and the overlapping technique. In a classification experiment using ETL9B, the largest database of handwritten characters in Japan, (it contains a total of 607,200 samples from 3036 categories) the speed and accuracy of classification by HLVQ was found to be higher than that by Self-Organizing feature Map (SOM) and Learning Vector Quantization methods. We demonstrate that the classification rate of the proposed system which uses multi-codebook vectors for each category under HLVQ can achieve higher speed and accuracy than that of systems which use average vectors.

In static multiprocessor scheduling, heuristic algorithms have been widely used. Instead of gaining execution speed, most of them show non promising solutions since they search only a part of solution spaces. In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm using the genetic algorithm (GA) which is a well-known stochastic search algorithm. The proposed algorithm, named ordered-deme GA (OGA), is based on the multiple subpopulation GA, where a global population is divided into several subpopulations (demes) and each demes evolves independently. To find better schedules, the OGA orders demes from the highest to the lowest deme and migrates both the best and the worst individuals at the same time. In addition, the OGA adaptively assigns different mutation probabilities to each deme to improve search capability. We compare the OGA with well-known heuristic algorithms and other GAs for random task graphs and the task graphs from real numerical problems. The results indicate that the OGA finds mostly better schedules than others although being slower in terms of execution time.

In recent years, the concept of the software radio has been put forward by the international communication society. It is well known that software radio will play an important role in third generation wireless communication systems. But until now there is not an acceptable concept of software radio. How to make software radio be applicable authentically, and how to develop its ascendancy? This paper introduces some new ideas about the key issues of software radio, including software radio architecture and its hardware platform, and it focuses on the design considerations of the hardware platform. Conventional software radio systems use pipeline architecture, which is not scalable and cannot fulfill the inherent requirements of software radios. In this paper a new layer structure of the hardware platform is proposed. It is an open architecture with flexibility and scalability. Then three schemes for hardware platform realization are introduced: bus architecture, switched network architecture, and fat tree architecture. An extensive analysis on advantages and disadvantages of each architecture is given. Then an application example is proposed. The switched network architecture is applied in the cellular wireless communication systems. The basestation is divided into four components according to their functions: antenna, IF, baseband, and control, which are connected by the ATM network. We call this virtualization of wireless communication systems. This will bring great benefits such as fast handoff, easily realization of different macrodiversity algorithm.

In this letter we propose a new mode for block ciphers which uses an unknown random block as feedback. We show that the successful differential/linear cryptanalyses of DES under the mode require at least the complexity of the exhaustive key search. We also present the processing overhead of our scheme compared to that of ECB mode.

In this paper, we study efficient scheduling algorithms that are suitable for ATM networks. In ATM networks, all packets have a fixed small length of 53 bytes and they are transmitted at very high rate. Thus time complexity of a scheduling algorithm is quite important. Most scheduling algorithms proposed so far have a complexity of O(log N) per packet, where N denotes the number of connections sharing the link. In contrast, weighted round robin (WRR) has the advantage of having O(1) complexity; however, it is known that its delay property gets worse as N increases. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose two new variants of WRR, uniform round robin (URR) and idling uniform round robin (I-URR). Both disciplines provide end-to-end delay and fairness bounds which are independent of N. Complexity of URR, however, slightly increases as N increases, while I-URR has complexity of O(1) per packet. I-URR also works as a traffic shaper, so that it can significantly alleviate congestion on the network. We also introduce a hierarchical WRR discipline (H-WRR) which consists of different WRR servers using I-URR as the root server. H-WRR efficiently accommodates both guaranteed and best-effort connections, while maintaining O(1) complexity per packet. If several connections are reserving the same bandwidth, H-WRR provides them with delay bounds that are close to those of weighted fair queueing.