We propose a method to realize soft-decision decoding for hard-detected signals. In this paper, a novel concept is introduced as "error-detected reliability. " The method is very useful for optical fiber communications (OFC) as hard detection is the only detection method for the OFC systems. We demonstrate our proposed method using the turbo code in which soft information is required for decoding. As a result, the simulation shows slight difference in the range of moderate to high signal-to-noise ratio between the proposed decoding scheme and the conventional turbo decoding scheme. Moreover, the bit error rate of 10-11 can be achieved by serial concatenation of a Reed-Solomon code and a turbo code for Q-factor lower than 8.0 dB with a bandwidth expansion ratio of 33.3%.

In certain computer and communication systems, the significant number of byte errors are not hard errors, but a few transient bit errors confined to byte regions. This kind of byte errors are called spotty byte errors, meaning, not all, but only 2 or 3 random bits, are corrupted in a byte. Especially, the codewords of memory systems which use recent high density wide I/O data semiconductor DRAM chips are prone to this kind of spotty byte errors. This is because, the presence of strong electromagnetic waves in the environment or the bombardment of an energetic particle on a DRAM chip is highly likely to upset more than just one bit stored in that chip. Under this situation, codes capable of correcting single spotty byte errors are suitable for application in semiconductor memory systems. This paper defines a spotty byte error as a random t-bit error confined to a b-bit byte and proposes a class of codes called Single t/b-error Correcting (St/bEC) codes which are capable of correcting single spotty byte errors occurring in computer and communication systems. For the case where the chip data output is 16 bits, i.e., b=16, the S3/16EC code proposed in this paper requires only 16 check bits, that is, only one chip is required for check bits at practical information lengths such as 64, 128 and 256 bits. Furthermore, this S3/16EC code is capable of detecting more than 95% of all single 16-bit byte errors at information length 64 bits.

A very low-power, high-speed flash A/D converter front-end composed of a new latched comparator was developed. We established a butterfly sorting technique to guarantee the monotonicity of the converter. The 6-bit A/D front-end achieves a speed of 100 Msps and dynamic range of 33 dB with power consumption of only 7 mW at the supply voltage of 1 V, and the butterfly sorter guarantees 6-bit monotonicity with an extra power consumption of 1 mW.

This paper describes two digital correction algorithms for ADC nonlinearity, targeted for mixed-signal LSI tester applications: an interpolation algorithm and a stochastic algorithm. Numerical simulations show that our algorithms compensate for ADC nonlinearity as well as missing codes and nonmonotonicity characteristics, and improve ADC SNDR and SFDR.

There is a strong demand to expand captioned broadcasting for TV news programs in Japan. However, keyboard entry of captioned manuscripts for news program cannot keep pace with the speed of speech, because in the case of Japanese it takes time to select the correct characters from among homonyms. In order to implement simultaneous subtitled broadcasting for Japanese news programs, a simultaneous subtitling system by speech recognition has been developed. This system consists of a real-time speech recognition system to handle broadcast news transcription and a recognition-error correction system that manually corrects mistakes in the recognition result with short delay time. NHK started simultaneous subtitled broadcasting for the news program "News 7" on the evening of March 27, 2000.

In this paper, the closed-form expressions of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and the outage probability are derived for a maximal ratio combining (MRC) two-dimensional (2-D)-RAKE receiver with imperfect power control in a frequency-selective Nakagami fading channel. The impact of power control error (PCE) on the performance of the receiver is analyzed for all kinds of fading environments. The results of numerical derivation and simulation indicate that the performance of 2-D-RAKE receivers degrades due to imperfect power control. But when PCE is not serious, increasing the number of antennae and temporal diversity order can compensate for the performance loss. The exact performance improvement due to space-time processing varies with the PCE and the fading environment.

The adaptive phase tracking scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals can provide superior PER performance in channels with varying phase noise power. It is an effective technique for achieving high-rate and high quality wireless transmission. This paper proposes a new simple adaptive phase tracking scheme for OFDM signals in order to realize high-rate wireless local area networks (LANs). The proposed scheme measures the integrated phase rotation in order to appropriately set the properties of the FIR filter in the phase tracking circuits. This scheme uses the fact that the integrated phase rotation is correlated to the phase noise power. Assuming an RMS delay spread of 100 ns, computer simulations show that the proposed scheme offers superior required Eb/N0 performance (with regard to the phase noise power) compared to the conventional fixed-tap scheme, where the phase noise to signal power ratios are below -18 dB. It also offers excellent PER performance at the packet length of 1000 bytes unlike the conventional schemes, which suffer degraded PER performance.

This paper proposes and investigates a coding and decoding scheme to achieve adaptive channel coding using a Finite State Machine (FSM) for Software Defined Radio (SDR). Adaptive channel coding and decoding systems that can switch between different coding rates and error correcting capabilities in order to adapt to changing applications and environments, are effective for SDR. However, in these systems, a receiver cannot always select the correct decoder which causes decoding errors, usually referred to as Decoder-Selection-Errors (DSE). We propose a trellis encoder estimation scheme that compensates for this problem. This scheme uses the circuit of FSM to limit the encoder transition and the Viterbi algorithm for maximum likelihood trellis encoder estimation. Computer simulations are applied for evaluating the DSE rate, the Bit Error Rate (BER) and Throughput of the proposed scheme in comparison with a conventional scheme.

In this paper, we analyze the convergence and steady-state behavior of the least mean-square (LMS) adaptive filtering algorithm for a finite-length phase-splitting hybrid-type decision feedback equalizer (H-DFE). With some approximations, we derive an iterative expression for the excess mean-square error (MSE) of the H-DFE, which is composed of three statistically dependent excess MSEs; that is, the excess MSEs of the feedforward filter (FFF), intersymbol interference predictive feedback filter (ISI-FBF), and noise predictive feedback filter (NP-FBF) taps. Computer simulation and analytical results show that the average eigenvalue of the input signal for the NP-FBF taps of the H-DFE is time-varying, whereas those for the FFF and ISI-FBF taps are fixed. Nevertheless, the H-DFE can be implemented with fixed step sizes that ensure the convergence of the LMS algorithm without performance degradation from the standpoint of convergence speed, as well as steady-state performance for digital subscriber line (xDSL) applications.

In this letter, we propose a two-stage object-based error-concealment technique for MPEG-2 video transmitted in a burst-packet-loss environment. A burst packet loss typically destroys a large area of MPEG-2 coded video. In the first stage, the missing area is intra-picture estimated and concealed in terms of a region-based approach. In the second stage, irregular-moving objects with respect to the background are identified and compensated from the predictive picture. As compared with conventional concealment approaches, the proposed method achieves better PSNR performance and reduces the visual artifacts.

We investigated the truncated convolutional code with the characteristics of a block code for block-based communication systems. Three truncation methods (direct truncation, tail-terminating, and tail-biting method) were introduced by other researchers. Each of the three methods has a weakness: the direct truncation method decreases the minimum distance, the tail-terminating method uses tail bits, and the tail-biting method can only be applied by using a complicated decoder. Although the tail-biting method gives a better BER performance than the other two methods, we cannot apply the tail-biting method in all situations. Occasionally, the tail-biting convolutional code does not exist. Wang et al. presented two necessary conditions for the existence of the tail-biting convolutional code of the rate-1/2 recursive systematic convolutional code. In this paper, we analyze the encoder of the convolutional code as a linear time invariant system, and present two theorems and six corollaries on the existence of the tail-biting convolutional code. These existence conditions are adaptable to all convolutional codes. In the communication system using the truncated convolutional code, these results are applicable to determining the truncation method.

Using eigenstructure approach to form interference canceler is very sensitive to pointing error, especially when the interference number is overestimated. This Letter presents an effective technique to correct the pointing error by the projection matrix of noise subspace. Based on the corrected steering angle, a proper blocking matrix of the eigenstructure interference canceler can be obtained to suppress the leakage of desired signal. Therefore, signal cancellation does not occur, even the interference number is overestimated in constructing the interference subspace.

This letter presents a new approximation algorithm suitable for Taylor series expansion. The algorithm can effectively reduce the approximation error by using only a small number of terms in series expansion. The proposed algorithm can be more easily implemented and has better performance than the conventional Euler approximation algorithm. Also, the approximation performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with direct approaches, such as least-squares and Chebyshev approximation algorithm to show the relative advantages of the proposed algorithm. This letter also presents an application example of the proposed approximation algorithm in carrier recovery of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modem.

This paper proposes a channel monitor-based unequal error protection scheme using a dynamic OFDM subcarrier assignment technique for broadband video transmission systems in frequency selective fading environments. In the proposed system, to achieve stable regeneration of the received video, subcarriers with relatively high channel gain are assigned to the high priority data (HPD) in the MPEG data. To further guarantee a required transmission quality of the HPD, the proposed system also employs subcarrier transmission power control with delay profile information (DPI) feedback-type channel estimation technique. Computer simulation confirms that the proposed technique is effective in preventing quality degradation with about 20 dB lower transmission power than the conventional systems in frequency selective fading environments.

We investigated the suppression of multiuser interference in uplink multicarrier CDMA systems using the minimum mean squared error combining (MMSEC) method. In MMSEC, many pilot symbols are required to converge the weight vectors, and if we use just a few pilot symbols, the performance cannot be improved very much. We therefore developed a method for calculating weight vectors for MMSEC that uses just a few pilot symbols. The impulse responses of all users are first estimated using the pilot symbols in the time domain and modulated by a discrete Fourier transform. Next, the correlation matrices and correlation vectors are estimated from the impulse responses and the spreading codes of all users. Finally, the weight vectors that are obtained from the correlation matrices and correlation vectors are multiplied by the received signal to suppress the multiuser interference. The results of computer simulations indicated that the bit-error-ratio performance obtained using this method was better than that obtained when using the conventional fading compensation scheme or when using conventional MMSEC with the recursive least squares algorithm.

We propose bit error rate (BER) evaluation methods for a trellis coded modulation (TCM) scheme over a Rayleigh fading channel by using importance sampling (IS). The simulation probability density function for AWGN and Rayleigh fading is separately designed. For efficient simulation of a system model with finite interleaver, frequency of the generation of fading sequences is reduced. The proposed method gives a good BER estimates over a Rayleigh fading channel.

In this letter, an analysis of bit error probability of 4-state soft decision Viterbi decoding is presented. The bit error probability of recursive systematic convolutional code is also derived.

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of impulsive class-A noise, co-channel interference due to other piconet, Rician fading on the packet error rate (PER), and throughput performance in the Bluetooth scatternet. Simulation results illustrate the significant difference in performance between synchronous and asynchronous Bluetooth systems. The paper also provides the insights on how to design Bluetooth scatternet for minimal PER and maximum throughput performance.

We developed a method for extracting negative examples when only positive examples are given as supervised data. This method calculates the probability of occurrence of an input example, which should be judged to be positive or negative. It considers an input example that has a high probability of occurrence but does not appear in the set of positive examples as a negative example. We used this method for one of important tasks in natural language processing: automatic detection of misspelled Japanese expressions. The results showed that the method is effective. In this study, we also described two other methods we developed for the detection of misspelled expressions: a combined method and a "leaving-one-out" method. In our experiments, we found that these methods are also effective.

In this letter, we introduce a two-state turbo-TCM scheme based on the concatenated tree codes. The proposed scheme can achieve near capacity performance yet has considerably lower decoding complexity compared with other existing turbo-TCM codes.