The modulated scattering antenna array (MSAA) is composed of one normal antenna element and several modulated scattering elements (MSEs). In this paper, a 2-element MSAA is used as the receiving antenna in a 2 2 multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system. MIMO performance of MSAA with various array spacing is measured to investigate the relation between the array spacing and the MIMO performance of the MSAA experimentally in the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) indoor environment. It is found that the error vector magnitude (EVM) and the channel capacity, which reflect MIMO performance, can be affected by the array spacing. The measured results of the MSAA were compared with that of two-dipole antenna array at the same condition.

This paper proposes a new overlay transmission system for wireless LAN with RTS/CTS exchange. Conventional timing synchronization schemes may fail in the presence of inter-system interference, because they have not been designed for overlay transmission. In the proposed system, a transmitter estimates the transmission timing of the next wireless LAN DATA frame, and then sends its DATA frame at almost the same time as the estimated transmission timing to easily establish timing synchronization at the receiver. Moreover, we employ a tapped delay line adaptive array antenna at both transmitter and receiver to effectively suppress interference due to overlay transmission in a rich multipath propagation environment. The frame error rate performances of the proposed system and the IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN are evaluated through computer simulations that assume an exponentially decaying 8-path non-line-of-sight fading channel and include a timing synchronization process. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system can achieve overlay transmission while avoiding interference in a rich multipath propagation environment.

An efficient noise reduction algorithm is proposed to improve speech recognition performance for human machine interfaces. In the algorithm, a probabilistic adaptation mode controller (AMC) is designed and adopted to the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC). To detect target speech intervals, the proposed AMC calculates the inter-channel correlation and estimates speech absence probability (SAP). Based on the SAP, the adaptation mode of the adaptive filter in the GSC is decided. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm significantly improves speech recognition performances and signal-to-noise ratios in real noisy environments.

A rigorous semi-analytical approach for the scalar field in a microstructured optical fiber, which is formed of layered cylindrical arrays of circular rods symmetrically distributed on each concentric cylindrical layer, is presented. The method uses the T-matrix of a circular rod in isolation and the generalized reflection and transmission matrices of cylindrical arrays. Numerical examples of the mode index for three-layered hexagonal structure of circular air holes are demonstrated and compared with those obtained by a variational method.

This paper presents a single-chip speech dialogue module and its evaluation on a personal robot. This module is implemented on an application processor that was developed primarily for mobile phones to provide a compact size, low power-consumption, and low cost. It performs speech recognition with preprocessing functions such as direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, noise cancellation, beamforming with an array of microphones, and echo cancellation. Text-to-speech (TTS) conversion is also equipped with. Evaluation results obtained on a new personal robot, PaPeRo-mini, which is a scale-down version of PaPeRo, demonstrate an 85% correct rate in DOA estimation, and as much as 54% and 30% higher speech recognition rates in noisy environments and during robot utterances, respectively. These results are shown to be comparable to those obtained by PaPeRo.

An extreamly large scale periodic array antenna is required for transmitting power from space solar power systems. Analysis of the huge-scale array antenna is important to estimate the radiation property of the array antenna, but a full-wave analysis requires too much computer memory and excessive CPU time. In order to overcome these difficulties, the impedance extension method is proposed as a method of approximate analysis for huge periodic array antennas. From the results of actual gain pattern obtained by the proposed method and its relative error, it is shown that edge effects of a huge-scale array antenna can be ignored in calculating the radiation property.

This paper presents a simple antenna system for land vehicle communication aimed at Engineering Test Satellite-VIII (ETS-VIII) applications. The developed antenna system which designed for mounting in a vehicle is compact, light weight and offers simple satellite-tracking operation. This system uses a microstrip patch array antenna, which includes onboard-power divider and switching circuit for antenna feeding control, due to its low profile. A Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver is constructed to provide accurate information on the vehicle's position and bearing during traveling. The personal computer (PC) interfaces as the control unit and data acquisition, which were specifically designed for this application, allow the switching circuit control as well as the retrieving of the received power levels. In this research, the antenna system was firstly examined in an anechoic chamber for S parameter, axial ratio, and radiation characteristics. Satisfactory characteristics were obtained. As for beam-tracking of antenna, it was examined in the anechoic chamber with the gain above 5 dBic and the axial ratio below 3 dB. Moreover, good received power levels for tracking the ETS-VIII satellite in outdoor measurement, were confirmed.

In this paper, we propose a routing method for 2-layer ball grid array packages that generates a routing pattern satisfying a design rule. In our proposed method, the routing structure on each layer is restricted while keeping most of feasible patterns to efficiently obtain a feasible routing pattern. A routing pattern that satisfies the design rule is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming. In experiments with seven data, we obtain a routing pattern such that satisfies the design rule within a practical time by using a mixed integer linear programming solver.

A metallic waveguide that has an array of dielectric rods located at a distance from the side wall of approximately one quarter the waveguide width was previously proposed for single mode propagation over a wide frequency range. In this study, the S parameters of such a waveguide were measured for the TE10 mode.

A composite patch array antenna with built-in polarizer has been developed to reduce road clutter noise by 20 dB for 76 GHz automotive radars. A polarizer is placed in front of Tx and Rx patch arrays within their reactive near-field region to suppress cross-polarized sidelobe radiation from their feeding lines while maintaining a low-profile characteristic with 4 mm thickness. Additional metal-lined absorbers within the composite antenna structure, while terminating cross-polarized waves undesirably excited by the patch arrays, also serve as miniature clutter plates to further reduce sidelobes toward the road surface. The resultant composite antenna achieved sidelobe levels of -45 dB, a 20 dB improvement over standard patch arrays, at elevation angles close to 90.

In this letter, an interference suppression scheme by MMSE combining in OFDM-antenna array with time shifted sampling (TSS) is proposed. An array antenna at a base station has been thoroughly investigated to increase the uplink capacity. The performance of the uplink is not only limited by the correlation between the antenna elements, which strongly depends on the spatial aspects of the channel, as well as the interference from the terminals. Numerical results through computer simulation show that the proposed scheme improves bit error rate performance because of interference suppression by MMSE combining and diversity reception by TSS at the same time.

This paper proposes a new antenna array calibration technique which uses frequency selection in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)/time division duplexing (TDD) systems. In the proposed method, subbands or frequencies of good channel conditions are initially selected for channel measurements. The relative calibration is performed at the selected subbands, which compensates for mismatch of analogue gains in multiple antennas using the measured uplink and downlink channel parameters. Furthermore, the calibration parameters are interpolated in the frequency domain for the whole bandwidth. The proposed calibration maintains accurate channel reciprocity for the whole bandwidth compared to the conventional calibration which does not use the frequency selection. The proposed calibration technique is effective in exploiting channel reciprocity at both base station and terminals with feasible amount of feedback and low-cost operation.

For phased and adaptive arrays of antennas, an optimal arrangement of antenna elements is essential to avoid grating lobes in the visible angular region of the array. Large sidelobes cause degradation in signal-to-noise ratio; grating lobes, in the worst case, cause malfunctions. One method of evaluating sidelobe level is square integration. For a given set element positions, evaluation by square integration of the sidelobes involves Fourier transform and numerical integration. For faster evaluation, we developed an equivalent transform algorithm that requires no numerical Fourier transform or integration. Using this new algorithm, we introduced a fast trial-and-error algorithm that iteratively applies random perturbation to the array, evaluates the function, and minimizes it. A number of separate runs of this algorithm have been conducted under the constraint of 3-fold rotational symmetry for stability. The optimal output, for which the function is minimized, is a uniformly spaced equilateral-triangular-type arrays that, unfortunately, has unwanted grating lobes. However the algorithm also yields variations trapped at local minima, some of which do not have grating lobes and whose sidelobe peaks are sufficiently low within a wide angular region. For the case N=12, a characteristic triagular-rectangular-type array often arises, which has not only better sidelobe properties as evaluated by square-integration and peak sidelobe, but also sufficient element-to-element clearance. For the case N=36, one of the results achieves a peak-sidelobe level of -8 dB, with a minimum element-to-element separation of 0.76 wavelength.

This paper presents the analysis and design of a reflection-cancelling transverse slot-pair array antenna with baffles by using the Spectrum of Two-Dimensional Solutions (S2DS) method. For the transverse slot array, the slot spacings with more than one free-space wavelength cause the grating-lobes. The baffles suppress the grating-lobes effectively. A one-dimensional slot array is extracted from the 2D array with in-phase excitation by assuming periodicity in the transversal direction. The uniform excitation over the finite array is synthesized iteratively to demonstrate the fast and accurate results by S2DS. A unit design model with the baffles is introduced to determine the initial parameters of the slot-pairs, which greatly accelerate the iterations process. Experiments at 25.3 GHz demonstrate the suppression of the grating lobes to the level less than -20.0 dB and also the good uniformity of the aperture field distribution.

In this paper, a method of the signal subspace interpolation to constructing a continuous fingerprint database for radio localization is proposed. When using the fingerprint technique, enhancing the accuracy of location estimation requires very fine spatial resolution of the database, which entails much time in collecting the data to build up the database. Interpolated signal subspace is presented to achieve a fine spatial resolution of the fingerprint database. The angle of arrival (AOA) and the measured signal subspace at known locations are needed to obtain the interpolated signal subspaces. The effectiveness of this method is verified by an outdoor experiment and the estimated location using this method was compared with those using the geometrically calculated fingerprint and the measured signal subspace fingerprint techniques.

In this Letter, a robust system identification method is proposed for the generalized sidelobe canceller using dual microphones. The conventional transfer-function generalized sidelobe canceller employs the non-stationarity characteristics of the speech signal to estimate the relative transfer function and thus is difficult to apply when the noise is also non-stationary. Under the assumption of W-disjoint orthogonality between the speech and the non-stationary noise, the proposed algorithm finds the speech-dominant time-frequency bins of the input signal by inspecting the system output and the inter-microphone time delay. Only these bins are used to estimate the relative transfer function, so reliable estimates can be obtained under non-stationary noise conditions. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the performance of the transfer-function generalized sidelobe canceller, while only sustaining a modest estimation error in adverse non-stationary noise environments.

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.

A new type of mode converter that converts TE30 to TE10 mode is proposed. As an example of the ease of fabrication, holes can be drilled at the top of a metallic waveguide and dielectric rods inserted. This converter is useful for application as a power divider or power combiner.

This paper proposes a new circuit-fed 2-D amplifying array architecture using the multi-ported aperture-coupled patch antennas. The power distribution achieved by this array is formed by stacking three kinds of basic cells repeatedly. Each cell, which serves as a radiator and also a power relay, has a multi-ported patch antenna and one or two amplifiers. The signal transmission coefficient of the cell from the input port to the output port is designed with a power level of 0 dB and a phase of 360. An X-band 4 3 element array with uniform amplitude distribution is demonstrated. The measured results, such as the antenna gain and the radiation patterns, agree very well with the predicted ones, due to the precision design of the basic cells. The measured gain of the antenna array is 27.7 dBiA at the frequency of 10.4 GHz on the H-plane, with a half-power beamwidth of 14 in the H-plane and 16 in the E-plane.

This paper proposes an indoor event detection system for homes and offices that is based on electric wave reception such as intrusion into home or office. The proposed system places antenna array on the receiver side and detects events such as intrusion using the eigenvector spanning signal subspace obtained by the antenna array. The eigenvector is based on not received signal strengths (RSS) but direction of arrival (DOA) of incident signals on the antenna array. Therefore, in a static state, the variance of the eigenvector over time is smaller than that of RSS. The eigenvector changes only when the indoor environment of interest changes intermittently and statically, or dynamically. The installation cost is low, because the detection range is wide owing to indoor reflections and diffraction of electric wave and only a pair of transmitter and receiver are used. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method can distinguish the state when no event occurs and that when an event occurs clearly. Since the proposed method has a low false detection rate, it offers higher detection rates than the systems based on RSS.