Although the probabilistic model checking tool called PRISM has been applied in many communication systems, such as wireless local area network, Bluetooth, and ZigBee, the technique is not used in a controller area network (CAN). In this paper, we use PRISM to model the mechanism of priority messages for CAN because the mechanism has allowed CAN to become the leader in serial communication for automobile and industry control. Through modeling CAN, it is easy to analyze the characteristic of CAN for further improving the security and efficiency of automobiles. The Markov chain model helps us to model the behaviour of priority messages.

Continuous processing and servicing of a new incoming session in LTE systems demands optimal tracking of the mobile user. In this letter, an optimal, information-theoretic framework is developed for tracking area update for next-generation LTE cellular systems. Shannon's entropy is used to characterize the location uncertainty of mobile user. The framework captures users' mobility patterns online and performs profile-based paging for optimizing the tracking area update cost. Simulation results demonstrate reductions in both update and paging costs in comparison to existing LTE systems.

Since the length of wires between different layers, even between the top and bottom layers, is acceptably small in 3D mesh-based NoC (three-Dimensional mesh-based Network on Chip), a structure in which an IP (Intelligence Property) core in a certain layer directly connected to a proper router in another layer may efficiently decrease the average latency of messages and increase the maximum throughput. With this idea, in the paper, we introduce a dual-port access structure, in which each IP core except that in the bottom layer is connected to two routers in two adjacent layers, and, in particular, the IP core in the bottom layer can be directly connected to the proper router in the top layer. Furthermore, we derive the close form expression of the average number of hops of messages and also give the quantitative analysis of the performance when the dual-port access structure is used. All the analytical results reveal that the average number of hops is reduced and the system performance is improved, including a decrease of average latency and an increase of maximum throughput. Finally, the simulation results confirm our theoretical analysis and show the advantage of the proposed dual-port access structure with a relatively small increment of area overhead.

Control Area Network (CAN) development began in 1983 and continues today. The forecast for annual world production in 2008 is approximately 65-67 million vehicles with 10-15 CAN nodes per vehicle on average . Although the CAN network is successful in automobile and industry control because the network provides low cost, high reliability, and priority messages, a starvation problem exists in the network because the network is designed to use a fixed priority mechanism. This paper presents a priority inversion scheme, belonging to a dynamic priority mechanism to prevent the starvation problem. The proposed scheme uses one bit to separate all messages into two categories with/without inverted priority. An analysis model is also constructed in this paper. From the model, a message with inverted priority has a higher priority to be processed than messages without inverted priority so its mean waiting time is shorter than the others. Two cases with and without inversion are implemented in our experiments using a probabilistic model checking tool based on an automatic formal verification technique. Numerical results demonstrate that low-priority messages with priority inversion have better expression in the probability in a full queue state than others without inversion. However, our scheme is very simple and efficient and can be easily implemented at the chip level.

Constriction resistance is calculated by numerical analysis using Laplace's equations for electric potential of steady state in many cases of contact spot dispersion-status. The results show that contact resistance does not increase beyond 1.5 times even if the total real contact area is about 15% of the apparent contact area. When real contact area is at least about 60% of the apparent contact area, the contact resistance is approximately the same as the constriction resistance acquired from the apparent contact area. When the real contact area is about 50% of the apparent contact area, the contact resistance is approximately constant without regard to the contact shape and contact-point dispersion layout. Therefore, it is proved that contact resistance can be practically calculated using apparent contact area instead of real contact area when there are many contact points caused by metal to metal contact.

Tin and its alloys have been applied for the plating of electrical contacts for low electrical power conditions. In particular, tin-plated contacts are widely used as connector contacts in automotive applications and as make-break contacts in keyboard switches. In the relationship between contact resistance (R) and contact load (W) for both solid and plated tin, singularities have been found. Previously established and well known theories on the deformation of contact interfaces cannot explain these singularities. In this study, to clarify these singularities, and to obtain a contact model explaining this phenomenon, contact traces for contact load were examined by SEM and STM. The obtained microscopic images indicated piling-up at the periphery of the contact area for both solid and plated tin. In this case the contact configuration comprised a platinum probe with a hemispherical tip surface and a flat tin surface for both solid and plated. When the probe was loaded, this tip of the probe sank into the soft tin surface owing to its lower hardness. In case of solid tin, the sinking of the probe surface into the tin surface causes piling-up around the periphery of the contact trace. In this deformation process, since the periphery of the indentation of the indented contact area severely slid against the surface of the platinum probe while applying a contact load, the contact resistance rapidly decreased with load. In this case, the center portion of the true contact area was not affected mechanically; thus, the surface film on the bottom portion of the deformed of the flat surface did not break down mechanically. On the other hand, in the case of a tin plated surface, similar piling up occurred; however, it was accompanied by scattering and separation of tin crystal grains from the surface. As a result of this process, a decrease in contact resistance similar to that for the solid tin occurred. Since the piling-up of the contact surface is a very important process in the application of connectors, the above-mentioned unusual characteristics were clarified in this study.

This paper presents hybrid type-II automatic repeat request (H-ARQ) for wireless wearable body area networks (BANs) based on ultra wideband (UWB) technology. The proposed model is based on three schemes, namely, high rate optimized rate compatible punctured convolutional codes (HRO-RCPC), Reed Solomon (RS) invertible codes and their concatenation. Forward error correction (FEC) coding is combined with simple cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error detection. The performance is investigated for two channels: CM3 (on-body to on-body) and CM4 (on-body to a gateway) scenarios of the IEEE802.15.6 BAN channel models for BANs. It is shown that the improvement in performance in terms of throughput and error protection robustness is very significant. Thus, the proposed H-ARQ schemes can be employed and optimized to suit medical and non-medical applications. In particular we propose the use of FEC coding for non-medical applications as those require less stringent quality of service (QoS), while the incremental redundancy and ARQ configuration is utilized only for medical applications. Thus, higher QoS is guaranteed for medical application of BANs while allowing coexistence with non-medical applications.

WBANs provide communication services in the vicinity of the human body. Since WBANs utilize both MICS frequency band for implant medical applications and ISM frequency band for medical and consumer electronics (CE) applications, MAC protocols in WBAN should be designed considering flexibility between medical and CE applications. In this letter, we identify the requirements of WBAN MAC protocols and propose a WBAN MAC protocol which satisfies the requirements. In order to provide transmission flexibility for various applications, we present the dynamic CFP allocation and opportunity period. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves improved throughput and latency in WBAN environment compared with IEEE 802.15.4.

An implantable WBAN path-loss model for a capsule endoscopy which is used for examining digestive organs, is developed by conducting simulations and experiments. First, we performed FDTD simulations on implant WBAN propagation by using a numerical human model. Second, we performed FDTD simulations on a vessel that represents the human body. Third, we performed experiments using a vessel of the same dimensions as that used in the simulations. On the basis of the results of these simulations and experiments, we proposed the gradient and intercept parameters of the simple path-loss in-body propagation model.

Electrical contacts are an important part of electrical circuits and many reliability problems are related to electrical contact failure. It is important to investigate the relationship between load and contact resistance which is an important factor of contact reliability. In this study, the effect of plated material and plated thickness on contact resistance was examined. The samples were constructed of a copper alloy with tin or silver plating. Contact configuration was hemispherical-flat contact. The contact resistance was measured by using a four-probe method with a load up to 40 N. The relation between indentation contact area (i.e. apparent contact area) and contact resistance was determined. As experimental results, the contact resistance depends on the indentation of the contact area. In the same contact area, tin-plated samples have higher resistance than those that are silver-plated due to their own resistivity. The constriction resistance of a plated layer, which depends on contact area, plated material and plated thickness, is analyzed by a theoretical solution, which is shown by R=Φρ /2a, using a surface resistance coefficient Φ . The theoretical results show almost good agreement with the experimental results. Thus, the indentation contact area (i.e. apparent contact area) is almost the same as the real contact area in this study.

A new low voltage operation of high voltage switching technique, which is capable of reducing leakage current by an order of three compared to conventional circuits, has been developed for sub-1.8 V low voltage mobile NAND flash memory. In addition, by using the proposed high voltage switch, chip size scaling can be realized due to reduced a minimum required space between the N-wells of selected and unselected blocks for isolation. The proposed scheme is essential to achieve low power operation NAND Flash memory, especially for mobile electronics.

In the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, access points (APs) are given the same priority as wireless terminals in terms of acquiring the wireless link, even though they aggregate several downlink flows. This feature leads to a serious throughput degradation of downlink flows, compared with uplink flows. In this paper, we propose a dynamic contention window control scheme for the IEEE 802.11e EDCA-based wireless LANs, in order to achieve fairness between uplink and downlink TCP flows while guaranteeing QoS requirements for real-time traffic. The proposed scheme first determines the minimum contention window size in the best-effort access category at APs, based on the number of TCP flows. It then determines the minimum and maximum contention window sizes in higher priority access categories, such as voice and video, so as to guarantee QoS requirements for these real-time traffic. Note that the proposed scheme does not require any modification to the MAC protocol at wireless terminals. Through simulation experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In this paper, new structure of Voltage-Mode MAX-MIN circuit are presented for nonlinear systems, fuzzy applications, neural network and etc. A differential pair with improved cascode current mirror is used to choose the desired input. The advantages of the proposed structure are high operating frequency, high precision, low power consumption, low area and simple expansion for multiple inputs by adding only three transistors for each extra input. The proposed circuit which is simulated by HSPICE in 0.35 µm CMOS process shows the total power consumption of 85 µW in 5 MHz operating frequency from a single 3.3-V supply. Also, the total area of the proposed circuit is about 420 µm2 for two input voltages, and would be negligibly increased for each extra input.

Toponyms and other named entities are main issues in unknown word processing problem. Our purpose is to salvage unknown toponyms, not only for avoiding noises but also providing them information of area candidates to where they may belong. Most of previous toponym resolution methods were targeting disambiguation among area candidates, which is caused by the multiple existence of a toponym. These approaches were mostly based on gazetteers and contexts. When it comes to the documents which may contain toponyms worldwide, like newspaper articles, toponym resolution is not just an ambiguity resolution, but an area candidate selection from all the areas on Earth. Thus we propose an automatic toponym resolution method which enables to identify its area candidates based only on their surface statistics, in place of dictionary-lookup approaches. Our method combines two modules, area candidate reduction and area candidate examination which uses block-unit data, to obtain high accuracy without reducing recall rate. Our empirical result showed 85.54% precision rate, 91.92% recall rate and .89 F-measure value on average. This method is a flexible and robust approach for toponym resolution targeting unrestricted number of areas.

The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) technique is presented in this paper as an estimation method for radio propagation prediction in large and complex wireless local area network (WLAN) environments. Its validity is shown by comparing measurements and Ray-trace method with FDTD data. The 2 GHz (802.11b/g) and 5 GHz (802.11a) frequency bands are used in both the calculations and experiments. The electric field (E-field) strength distribution has been illustrated in the form of histograms and cumulative ratio graphs. By using the FDTD method to vary the number of human bodies in the environment, the effects on E-field distribution due to human body absorption are also observed for 5 GHz WLAN design.

This paper proposes an ultra-wideband double-directional spatio-temporal channel sounding technique using transformation between frequency- and time-domain (FD and TD) signals. Virtual antenna arrays, composed of omnidirectional antennas and scanners, are used for transmission and reception in the FD. After Fourier transforming the received FD signals to TD ones, time of arrival (TOA) is estimated using a peak search over the TD signals, and then angle of arrivals (AOA) and angle of departure (AOD) are estimated using a weighted angle histogram with a multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm applied to the FD signals, inverse-Fourier transformed from the TD signals divided into subregions. Indoor channel sounding results validated that an appropriate weighting reduced a spurious level in the angle histogram by a factor of 0.1 to 0.2 in comparison with that of non-weighting. The proposed technique successfully resolved dominant multipath components, including a direct path, a single reflection, and a single diffraction, in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS environments. Joint TOA and AOA/AOD spectra were also derived from the sounding signals. The spectra illustrated the dominant multipath components (agreed with the prediction by ray tracing) as clusters.

It is necessary to know how the contact voltage and contact area vary with time to clarify the physics of contact lifetime and contact resistance. In this paper, to clarify the effect of the heating value on the diameter of the contact area, the variations of the contact voltage and contact diameter with time are measured at a low-speed breaking contact near the thermal equilibrium condition under which a stable bridge is generated. The effect of the heating value on the relationship between the contact diameter and the length of the bridge at breaking is also discussed. In the results, the contact voltage waveform was found to be macroscopically proportional to the displacement of the moving electrode lc. On the other hand, the contact diameter dc decreased slightly with increasing lc. At all currents investigated dc decreased when lc increased. The length of the bridge at breaking was increased by increasing the current. A large heating value of the contact area resulted in a long bridge because the volume of the melted metal increases.

In direct-conversion orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receivers, the impact of frequency-dependent I/Q mismatch (IQ-M) with carrier frequency offset (CFO) must be considered. A preamble-assisted estimation is developed to circumvent the frequency-dependent IQ-M with CFO. The results of a simulation and an experiment show that the proposed method could provide good estimation efficiency and enhance the system performance. Moreover, the proposed scheme is compatible with current wireless local area network standards.

We describe the applicability of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with an enlarged effective area Aeff to a distributed Raman amplification (DRA) transmission. We investigate the DRA transmission performance numerically over a large Aeff PCF taking account of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement RSNR in the S, C, and L bands. We show that an RSNR of 3 dB can be expected by utilizing DRA with a maximum pump power of 500 mW when the Aeff of the PCF is 230 µm2.

This letter presents an ultra low-jitter clock generator that employs an area-efficient LC-VCO. In order to fully utilize the area of the on-chip inductor, the loop filter of a phase locked loop (PLL) is located underneath the inductor. A prototype chip implemented in 0.13 µm CMOS process achieves 105 MHz to 225 MHz of clock frequency while consuming 4.2 mW from 1.2 V supply. The measured rms jitter and normalized rms jitter of the proposed clock generator are 2.8 ps and 0.031% at 105 MHz, respectively.