This paper first presents an active integrated antenna configuration designed for broadband mobile wireless access systems using the 25-GHz band. This active integrated antenna comprises a microstrip antenna array and RF front-end circuits adopting spatial power combining schemes for reduced power consumption of the power amplifiers. Furthermore, the antenna and RF circuits are integrated into each side of a thick copper backing plate and both are connected through microstrip line /slot transitions. The developed active integrated antenna achieves the output power of 14.6 dBm and a noise figure of less than 5 dB. The wireless system using the developed active integrated antenna achieves a 6-dB improvement in the packet error rate compared to that using a passive antenna with the same array design as the active integrated antenna. Furthermore, we obtained the first license of the active integrated antenna for commercial use in high-speed wireless communication systems in Japan.

In this paper, a simple subcarrier selection combining technique is proposed for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with multiple receive antennas. The subcarrier-based selection algorithm is developed in the frequency domain to achieve an optimal selection combining gain for OFDM systems, instead of the antenna-based selection algorithms in the time domain or frequency domain. The proposed technique selects an optimal subcarrier with a maximum channel gain among all the receive antennas with the same subcarrier position, based on the estimated channel frequency response during the training period. Hardware complexity for the proposed technique is minimal since it requires single front-end with multiple receive antennas and single baseband demodulator. It is shown by computer simulation that a significant gain can be achieved by the proposed technique over the conventional selection combining technique for OFDM systems in practical situations.

This paper focuses on a global ultrasonic system for self-localization of a mobile robot. The global ultrasonic system consists of some ultrasonic generators fixed at some arbitrary position in the global coordinates and two receivers in the moving coordinates of the mobile robot. This system is used to obtain the state vector of the mobile robot in the global coordinates from the distance measurement between the ultrasonic generator and the receiver. In order to avoid the cross-talk and to synchronize the ultrasonic sensors, the sequential cuing technique using small-sized radio frequency module is adopted. An extended Kalman filter algorithm is used to process the noisy ultrasonic signal and to estimate the state vector. Computer simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed global ultrasonic system.

A wide variety of visual textures could be successfully modeled as spatially variant by quantitatively describing them through the variation of their local spatial frequency and/or local orientation components. This class of patterns includes flow-like, granular or oriented textures. Modeling is achieved by assuming that locally, textured images contain a single dominant component describing their local spatial frequency and modulating amplitude or contrast. Spatially variant textures are non-homogeneous in the sense of having nonstationary local spectra, while remaining locally coherent. Segmenting spatially variant textures is the challenging task undertaken in this paper. Usually, the goal of texture segmentation is to split an image into regions with homogeneous textural properties. However, in the case of image regions with spatially variant textures, there is no global homogeneity present and thus segmentation passes through identification of regions with globally nonstationary, but locally coherent, textural content. Local spatial frequency components are accurately estimated using Gabor wavelet outputs along with the absolute magnitude of the convolution of the input image with the first derivatives of the underlying Gabor function. In this paper, a frequency estimation approach is used for segmentation. Indeed, at the boundary between adjacent textures, discontinuities occur in texture local spatial frequency components. These discontinuities are interpreted as corresponding to texture boundaries. Experimental results are in remarkable agreement with human visual perception, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

The coarse frequency offset estimation algorithm has to provide an initial frequency error estimate, which is sufficiently accurate in order to operate reliably for the subsequent fine frequency synchronization algorithm. In this letter, we deal with a coarse frequency offset estimation for digital audio broadcasting. We propose an improved frequency synchronization scheme which uses the minimum energy detection scheme. We compare the performance of proposed scheme with that of conventional schemes under AWGN and Rayleigh channel. It has been shown that the proposed algorithm has high robustness against a large range of symbol timing offset with a low complexity.

Frequency channel allocation according to the interference among links is important in autonomous distributed control wireless base station networks from the viewpoint of efficient frequency utilization. It is generally difficult to estimate the interference imposed on other links in a distributed control scheme. This paper proposes a novel frequency channel allocation scheme employing distributed control utilizing broadcast signals to estimate the intensities and frequencies of the interference to other links. The frequency channel, which can be allocated to a link from the viewpoint of the degree of the interference imposed on other links, can be found by receiving broadcast signals. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme efficiently allocates frequency channels to each link to avoid the interference.

An optical FM system using an optical FM LD (laser diode) and an optical frequency discriminator (OFD), in which a nonlinear compensation scheme based on the interaction between its nonlinearities can minimize intermodulation distortion. This paper theoretically investigates the minimization influence for 3rd plus 5th order intermodulation distortion power for an optical FM radio-on-fiber system. The carrier to noise-plus-distortion power ratio (CNDR) is theoretically analyzed in employing the OFD whose transmission characteristic is controlled by a phase shifter. The results show that the designed receiver can achieve higher CNDR in the application of multicarrier transmission.

A frequency-tuning method in the microwave region, which maintains a high unloaded Q-factor, was demonstrated using a double-sapphire-loaded cavity which operates on the Whispering Gallery mode, WGH9,1,0. Two adjacent nominally identical sapphire cylinders were positioned in a copper cavity and tuned by changing their relative coupling. A frequency tuning range of 85 MHz and a maximum unloaded Q-factor of 1.3 105 was experimentally measured at room temperature. This is only 13% less than the single resonator Q-factor, which is a small compromise to pay for the increased tuning capacity.

Fully embedded spiral inductors in a low loss dielectric multi-layer were designed and fabricated using a low temperature co-fired ceramics (LTCC) technology for RF SIP (system in package) integrations. The line width/space and the number of spiral layers were optimized within five layers of LTCC dielectric for high Q-factor, high self-resonant frequency (SRF), process easiness, and compact size. The embedded multi-layer spiral inductors reveal better performance in terms of Q-factor, SRF and the effective inductance Leff than planar spiral inductors of the same dimension and number of turns. The optimized multi-layer spiral inductor shows maximum Q of 56, Leff of 6.6 nH at Qmax and SRF of 3.6 GHz while planar spiral inductors have maximum Q of 49, Leff of 5.8 nH at Qmax and SRF of 3.0 GHz.

We describe a low-cost and extremely stable millimeter-wave transmission system that uses a double-side-band (DSB) millimeter-wave self-heterodyne transmission technique. This technique allows us to use a comparatively low-cost and unstable millimeter-wave oscillator regardless of the modulation format. Furthermore, a transmission band-pass-filter (BPF) is not needed in the millimeter-wave band. The system cost can therefore be substantially reduced. We have theoretically and experimentally evaluated the carrier-to-noise power ratio (CNR) performance that can be obtained when using this technique relative to that attainable through a conventional millimeter-wave self-heterodyne technique where a single-side-band signal is transmitted. Our results show that the DSB self-heterodyne transmission technique can improve CNR by more than 3 dB.

In an attempt to improve the performance under frequency selective fading environment, we develop in this paper an orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) system in which adaptive interleaving is applied. The adaptive interleaving is a method that assigns symbols adaptively to the subcarriers in order to cope with frequency selective fading based on a channel state information (CSI) sent back from the reception end. The concept of adaptive interleaving is to maximize a free Euclidean distance in the limited interleave size. In this paper, we extend the method by an introduction of bit interleaving and multiple trellis coded modulation (MTCM). MTCM assigns two or more symbols to one trellis branch and shows good performance in frequency selective fading. If we could assign those set of symbols with an aid of the adaptive interleaving, the performance improvement can be expected. Another improvement method considered in this paper is the use of bit interleaving. The bit interleaving techniques randomize the effect of channel more efficiently compared to the case of symbols interleaving. Thus the further performance improvement is expected. One draw back is that since the interleaving process is done in bit level, bit interleaving can not be applied to TCM nor MTCM. In this paper, we mainly focus on adaptive bit and symbol interleaving and discuss the performance from the point of interleaving effect, and the error correcting code (convolutional code and MTCM).

In this paper, we propose a modified CP-AFC (Cross-Product Automatic Frequency Control) algorithm to enhance coherent signal detection for WCDMA reverse link receiver. We introduce a moving average filter at the FDD input to decrease the noise effect by increasing the number of cross-products, since pilot symbol in WCDMA is not transmitted continuously. We also add normalization algorithm to overcome the conventional CP-FDD's sensitivity to the variance of input signal amplitude and to increase the linear range of S-curve. For rapid frequency acquisition and tracking, we adopt a multi-stage tracking mode. We applied the proposed algorithm in the implementation of WCDMA base station modem successfully.

To sample a band-limited analog signal directly from the high frequency down to the baseband for the digital signal processing with significantly reduced computation, several concepts of the bandpass sampling are introduced. In this paper, a robust bandpass sampling scheme when there exist frequency deviations due to the channel effect and hardware instability is proposed for practical use, and the effects of the frequency deviations are discussed to select a proper sampling frequency.

In this paper, we propose a new transmitter diversity. We propose a combined system with path diversity gain of the distributed antennas and frequency diversity gain of the multi-carrier. The proposed system transmits different data using several sub-carriers which are correlated, while, transmitting the same data using several sub-carriers which are decorrelated. It can achieve combined path and frequency diversity in a variable frequency selective fading channel. It provides high data rate services by transmitting the different data using each correlated carrier, and supports good quality by transmitting the same data on decorrelated carriers using multiple antennas. The proposed system is applicable to multimedia service and can achieve high quality according to channel condition. Thus, the proposed system is sufficiently flexible enough to very support a variety of video, image, voice and data services at a high level of quality.

The OFDM technique has recently received considerable attention in the fields of wireless LAN communication systems. It is accompanied with many practical issues and one major issue is synchronization. In this letter, we propose a frequency offset estimation technique for OFDM system. The proposed frequency offset estimator employing interpolation technique in the frequency domain has a simple structure and good performance.

Effects of high-frequency cyclic input and noise on interspike intervals in the coupled Bonhoeffer-van der Pol (BVP) model are studied with computer simulation. When two BVP elements are weakly coupled and cyclic input or noise is added to the first element, the interspike intervals of the second element decrease non-monotonically as the amplitude of the input increases. Further, complicated bifurcations in the interspike intervals are caused by cyclic input in the coupled BVP model in the oscillating state. Effects of the coupling on small rotations due to noise and the interruption of oscillations due to cyclic input, which occur when the equilibrium point is close to the critical point, are also studied. The non-monotonic changes and bifurcations in the interspike intervals are attributed to the phase locking of the coupled elements.

We propose a new algorithm for blind source separation (BSS), in which frequency-domain independent component analysis (FDICA) and time-domain ICA (TDICA) are combined to achieve a superior source-separation performance under reverberant conditions. Generally speaking, conventional TDICA fails to separate source signals under heavily reverberant conditions because of the low convergence in the iterative learning of the inverse of the mixing system. On the other hand, the separation performance of conventional FDICA also degrades significantly because the independence assumption of narrow-band signals collapses when the number of subbands increases. In the proposed method, the separated signals of FDICA are regarded as the input signals for TDICA, and we can remove the residual crosstalk components of FDICA by using TDICA. The experimental results obtained under the reverberant condition reveal that the separation performance of the proposed method is superior to those of TDICA- and FDICA-based BSS methods.

In this letter, we propose a frequency domain active noise control system using the time difference simultaneous perturbation method. This method is an algorithm based on the simultaneous perturbation method which updates the coefficients of the noise control filter only by use of the error signal. The time difference simultaneous perturbation method updates the filter coefficients by using one kind of error signal, while the simultaneous perturbation method updates the filter coefficients by using two kinds of error signal. In the ANC systems, the time difference simultaneous perturbation method is superior because ANC systems cannot obtain two error signals at the same time. When this method is applied to ANC systems, the convergence speed can be increased to a maximum of twice that of the conventional method.

Beaulieu has proposed four signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimators for quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signaling in time domain. In this letter, we propose SNR estimators for QPSK signaling in frequency domain. A discrete Fourier transform (DFT) algorithm is used for the frequency domain analysis of the received signal. The frequency spectrum enables biased SNR estimation in the frequency domain. Circular convolution is used for robust and fast SNR estimation when the received signal exhibits a frequency offset. Simulation results show that the new estimators present good performance even when the received signal exhibits a large frequency offset.

This paper discusses a nonlinear function for independent component analysis to process complex-valued signals in frequency-domain blind source separation. Conventionally, nonlinear functions based on the Cartesian coordinates are widely used. However, such functions have a convergence problem. In this paper, we propose a more appropriate nonlinear function that is based on the polar coordinates of a complex number. In addition, we show that the difference between the two types of functions arises from the assumed densities of independent components. Our discussion is supported by several experimental results for separating speech signals, which show that the polar type nonlinear functions behave better than the Cartesian type.