A feasibility study has been made of the detection possibility of radio wave noises, i.e., Martian atmospherics, emitted from discharges in the Martian atmosphere during large dust storms. The spacecraft NOZOMI, which was launched in 1998, is to be placed on an elliptic orbit around Mars with perigee of 150-200 km. An onboard-equipment LFA (Low Frequency Plasma wave Analyzer) has capability to measure the low frequency plasma waves in the frequency range from 10 Hz to 32 kHz. In order to know if the LFA can detect the atmospheric radio noises, the propagation characteristics of electromagnetic waves through the Martian ionosphere are studied theoretically by using a full-wave method. The ionosphere is modeled as a magneto-ionic medium based on the recent observations of magnetic anomaly by Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, and the atmospheric constituent and electron density by Viking observations. Our calculation shows that the waves at frequencies less than a hundred hertz can propagate with low attenuation and reach to altitudes above 200 km in the whistler-mode in the regions of magnetic anomalies in the dayside ionosphere. It is shown that the radio noises emitted from electric discharge in an intense dust storm, with the intensity over -30 dBV/m/Hz at the ionospheric entry point, can be sensed by the LFA. The observational identification of Martian atmospherics will contribute to the physical study of charge/discharge process in the Martian atmosphere.

In software-based wireless multimedia communications systems, each mobile terminal will be able to select its best-suited transmission format according to its quality of service (QoS) and channel condition. In this paper, we focus attention on "access scheme selectability" in such a software-based system, and discuss the traffic performance improvement due to adaptive access scheme selection. Assuming a software-based TDMA/CDMA system where time division multiple access (TDMA) and direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) schemes are flexibly selectable, we evaluate the traffic performance in terms of average delay with a typical multimedia service model to be supported in future wireless communications systems. In the TDMA/CDMA system, how to determine an appropriate access scheme for a user is a key issue. Therefore, we discuss the selection algorithm for efficiently supporting heterogeneous multimedia services. Our computer simulation results show that the software-based system with a simple access scheme selection algorithm can significantly improve the traffic performance as compared with conventional hardware-based systems.

In this article, we shall propose an efficient anonymous channel protocol for wireless communications. The most important feature of our proposed protocol has the property of untraceability. In our scheme, the mobile stations (MSs) and the home network (HN) must authenticate each other. Moreover, the HN is untraceable in such a way that supports location anonymity and MSs identity anonymity for MSs roaming, dynamic channel assignment and broadcasting. Compare our protocol with Juang et al.'s protocol, our mobile agent communication cost is 3m which is more efficient than the Juang et al.'s protocol 5m. At the same time, our mobile agent computation cost is 2Th which is also more efficient than the Juang et al.'s protocol 1Tpublic+1Th. We can avoid employing public key cryptography in the anonymous channel ticket authentication phase since to keep the computation cost down.

The paper proposes a transmitter diversity scheme with a desired signal selection for the mobile communication systems in which the severe cochannel interference (CCI) is assumed to occur at the base station. The feature of the proposed scheme is that the criterion of the downlink branch selection is based on the desired signal power estimated by the correlation between the received signal and the unique word at the matched filter. Moreover, the unique word length control method according to the instantaneous SIR is applied to the proposed scheme, taking account of the uplink transmission efficiency. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides the better performance than the conventional transmitter diversity in the severe CCI environments, and that the unique word length control method applied to the proposed scheme decreases the unique word length without the degradation of the transmission quality, comparing with the fixed unique word length method.

A timer-based scheme is proposed to manage information within terminal and service profiles for both incall registration/deregistration of UPT users and incall registration resets of terminal owners. In the timer-based scheme, information related to incall registration for a UPT user in a terminal profile is deleted due to a timer expiration without accessing the terminal profile. The performance of the timer-based scheme is compared with the previously proposed request-based scheme in terms of; 1) total cost and, 2) the number of terminal profile accesses per unit time for a terminal. Even though provision of the timer-based scheme requires the modification of incoming call delivery procedure, the timer-based scheme can reduce both the total cost and the number of terminal profile accesses compared to the previously proposed request-based scheme.

This paper proposes a new hybrid active noise control (ANC) system without the estimation of the secondary path filter in advance. The algorithm of the feedforward part of the proposed method is based on the simultaneous equations method and the feedback part employs the filtered-X LMS algorithm. The estimation of the secondary path filter is obtained in the operation of the feedforward part and it is used in the feedback part. When the secondary path changes in the operation of the system, the proposed system can follow to this change. In the simulation example which treats the colored measurement noise, the fine noise reduction performance is obtained.

Nowadays, when people colloquially use the word "wireless," they almost always mean a portable telephone. Over the last 10 years, there has been tremendous growth in the mobile communications markets not only in Japan but also worldwide. For these 10 years, the most popular service has been dominated by voice communication. However, modern mobile communications systems are shifting their focus from solely voice communication to electronic mailing and Internet access. From now, we will evolve into a wireless multimedia society, where a combination of mobile communications and the Internet will play an important role. Wireless technology is the core of mobile communications systems. This article, which focuses on wireless technology, looks at how mobile communications systems have evolved over the last 10 years and looks to the future of advanced wireless technologies that will be necessary to realize a true wireless multimedia society in the coming decade.

Dr. Kenji Koyama, one of the most respected and prominent Japanese researchers in modern cryptography, passed away on March 27, 2000. He left behind him many outstanding academic achievements in cryptography as well as other areas such as emotion transmission theory, learning and mathematical games. In this manuscript, with our deepest sympathy and greatest appreciation for his contribution to our society, we introduce his major works mainly in cryptography, although his papers in other areas are included in the bibliography list.

There are more and more information services provided on the wireless networks. Due to long network delay of wireless links, transactions will be long-lived transactions. In such a situation, the occurrence of handoff is inevitable, and thus a wireless link held by a mobile unit crossing cell boundaries might be forced to terminate. It is undesirable that an active transaction is forced to terminate. A queueing scheme has been proposed to solve the problem of forced termination of transactions in our previous research. However, when 2PL protocol is employed, suspending an active transaction will elongate the lock holding time and thus degrade the system performance. In this paper, we propose two guard channel schemes (GCS), static and dynamic, to reduce the probability of forced termination of transactions. In dynamic GCS, the number of channels reserved in a base station is dynamically assigned according to the number of transaction calls which may handoff to this cell while the number of guard channels is fixed in static GCS. An analytic model based on Markov chain is derived to evaluate the system performance. The correctness of this model is verified by simulation. The experimental results show that a significant improvement is achieved by using the dynamic GCS.

A history of the English IEICE Transactions from the beginning is stated through the eyes of the person who has been involved in promoting the Transactions, by a description of why and how it has actually been reformed. The purpose and significance of the English IEICE Transactions, especially of the IEICE Trans. Fundamentals, are clarified.

In the beginning of the new century, many information appliance (IA) products will replace traditional electronic appliances to help people in smart, efficient, and low-cost ways. These successful products must be capable of communicating multimedia information, which is embedded into the electronic appliances with high integration, innovation, and power-throughput tradeoff. In this paper, we develop a codesign procedure to analyze, compare, and emulate the multimedia communication applications to find the candidate implementations under different criteria. The experimental results demonstrate that in general, memory technology dominates the optimal tradeoff and ALU improvements impact greatly on particular applications. The results also show that the proposed procedure is effective and quite efficient.

Recently, an efficient algorithm has been proposed for finding all solutions of systems of nonlinear equations using linear programming. In this algorithm, linear programming problems are formulated by surrounding component nonlinear functions by rectangles. In this letter, it is shown that weakly nonlinear functions can be surrounded by smaller rectangles, which makes the algorithm very efficient.

The maximum likelihood estimate of a mixture model is usually found by using the EM algorithm. However, the EM algorithm suffers from a local optima problem and therefore we cannot obtain the potential performance of mixture models in practice. In the case of mixture models, local maxima often have too many components of a mixture model in one part of the space and too few in another, widely separated part of the space. To escape from such configurations we proposed a new variant of the EM algorithm in which simultaneous split and merge operations are repeatedly performed by using a new criterion for efficiently selecting the split and merge candidates. We apply the proposed algorithm to the training of Gaussian mixtures and the dimensionality reduction based on a mixture of factor analyzers using synthetic and real data and show that the proposed algorithm can markedly improve the ML estimates.

In the future Internet, hierarchically classified Quality of Service (QOS) controls will be effective because various connections requiring different QOS are mixed. However, even in such an environment, among the same class connections, performance protection to harmful impact from the other connections and quality differentiation between connections will be required furthermore. In this paper, from this point of view, we focus on the active connections succession time (age of active connections) as a new dimensional criterion for buffer controls. To be concrete, the packet discarding control of congested router's buffer based on active connections is proposed. Moreover, its performance is evaluated through TCP/IP level simulation from the viewpoint of file transfer time. Conventional Internet can be regarded as the environment where only one class traffic exists (unit class environment). The proposed control scheme can provide powerful differentiation capability to avoid the performance disruption of total connections even in the conventional Internet.

Recently, two approaches investigated indexing and retrieving videos. One approach utilized the visual features of individual objects, and the other approach exploited the spatio-temporal relationships between multiple objects. In this paper, we integrate both approaches into a new video model, called the Visual-Spatio-Temporal (VST) model to represent videos. The visual features are modeled in a topological approach and integrated with the spatio-temporal relationships. As a result, we defined rich sets of VST relationships which support and simplify the formulation of more semantical queries. An intuitive query interface which allows users to describe VST features of video objects by sketch and feature specification is presented. The conducted experiments prove the effectiveness of modeling and querying videos by the visual features of individual objects and the VST relationships between multiple objects.

In this paper we have presented a new method for seismic signal analysis, based on the ARMA modeling and a fuzzy LVQ clustering method. The objective achieved in this work is to sense the changes made naturally or artificially on the seismogram signal, and to detect the sources, which caused these changes (seismic classification). During the study, we have also found out that the model is sometimes capable to alarm the further seismic events just a little time before the onset of those events (seismic prediction). So the application of the proposed method both in seismic classification and seismic prediction are studied through the experimental results. The study is based on the background noise of the teleseismic short period recordings. The ARMA model coefficients are derived for the consecutive overlapped windows. A base model is then generated by clustering the calculated model parameters, using the fuzzy LVQ method proposed by Nassery & Faez in [19]. The time windows, which do not take part in [19] model generation process, are named as the test windows. The model coefficients of the test windows are then compared to the base model coefficients through some pre-defined composition rules. The result of this comparison is a normalized value generated as a measure of similarity. The set of the consecutive similarity measures generate above, produce a curve versus the time windows indices called as the characteristic curves. The numerical results have shown that the characteristic curves often contain much vital seismological information and can be used for source classification and prediction purposes.

In this paper we propose SAS-Coin, a very practical micro payment scheme based on a hash chain and a simple one time password authentication protocol called SAS. While it has many desirable features of a coin (anonymity etc.), it has no public key operations at any stage and has very little overheads. Moreover authentication is also available and a session key could be generated for encrypted information supply without any additional cost at all. Since there are no public key operations this is extremely useful for mobile telephone applications. This has sufficient security even for larger payments. Comparative analysis with some of the already proposed systems is also done.

To achieve high link availability at Ka-band geosynchronous satellite communication systems, an adaptive CDMA scheme as a rain fade countermeasure is proposed. The proposed adaptive CDMA scheme reserves and shares orthogonal sequences to countermeasure a rain fade. In the adaptive CDMA scheme, the base station allocates a set of orthogonal sequences to each user, and the number of sequences in a set is determined by the amount of rain attenuation. A symbol repetition technique is also used to compensate signal energy loss due to the rain fade. Our results show that when the base station has 64 free orthogonal codes, the adaptive CDMA scheme can save on its power by 4.2 dB compared to conventional CDMA scheme. The occupation rate of codes also shows that the adaptive CDMA can support multiple users simultaneously in even severe rain fade condition.

An Off-line mammography screening system is used in pre-screening mammograms to separate high-risk mammograms from most normal cases. Off-line system can run before radiologist's review and is particularly useful in the national breast cancer screening program which usually consists of high percentage of normal cases. Until now, the shortcomings of on-line detection of clustered microcalcifications from a mammogram remain in the necessity of manual selection of regions of interest. The developed technique focuses on detection of microcalcifications within a region of interest indicated by the radiologist. Therefore, this kind of system is not efficient enough to process hundreds of mammograms in a short time without a large number of radiologists. In this paper, based on a "hierarchically-coarse-to-fine" approach, an off-line mammography screening system for the detection and segmentation of clustered microcalcifications is presented. A serial off-line procedures without any human intervention should consider the complexity of organization of mammograms. In practice, it is impossible to use one technique to obtain clustered microcalcifications without consideration of background text and noises from image acquisition, the position of breast area and regions of interest. "Hierarchically-coarse-to-fine" approach is a serial procedures without any manual operations to reduce the potential areas of clustered microcalcifications from a mammogram until clustered microcalcifications are found. The reduction of potential areas starts with a mammogram, through identification of the breast area, identification of the suspicious areas of clustered microcalcifications, and finally segmentation of clustered microcalcifications. It is achieved hierarchically from coarse level to fine level. In detail, the proposed system includes breast area separation, enhancement, detection and localization of suspicious areas, segmentation of microcalcifications, and target selection of microcalcifications. The system separates its functions into hierarchical steps and follows the rule of thumb "coarse detection followed by fine segmentation" in performing each step of processing. The decomposed hierarchical steps are as follows: The system first extracts the breast region from which suspicious areas are detected. Then precise clustered microcalcification regions are segmented from the suspicious areas. For each step of operation, techniques for rough detection are first applied followed by a fine segmentation to accurately detect the boundaries of the target regions. With this "hierarchically-coarse-to-fine" approach, a complicated work such as the detection of clustered microcalcifications can be divided and conquered. The effectiveness of the system is evaluated by three experienced radiologists using two mammogram databases from the Nijmegen University Hospital and the Taichung Veterans General Hospital. Results indicate that the system can precisely extract the clustered microcalcifications without human intervention, and its performance is competitive with that of experienced radiologists, showing the system as a promising asset to radiologists.

Frequency-selective fading due to multipath propagation is serious hindrance in high-speed TDMA mobile communications. An adaptive antenna has been proposed to reduce the frequency-selective fading and realize path-diversity. This paper presents a criterion which selects multipath signals and weighting factors for combining them. First, we describe a selection criterion which chooses the multipath signals for the path-diversity. We propose a ratio of signal power to error power for the criterion. Furthermore, we propose weighting factors which realize approximately the maximal ratio combining. Computer simulation results show that the proposed selection criterion and weighting factors reveal excellent performance.