This paper reports the thermal stability of particulate media, which include Co-Fe oxide, CrO2, and thick and thin MP tapes. By measuring the time decay of magnetization at room temperature, fluctuation fields were obtained as a function of reverse applied field. It was clarified that the fluctuation field has a constant and minimum value when the reverse applied field is equal to coercivity. Minimum fluctuation fields for the four particulate tapes were measured at several environmental temperatures ranging from -75 to +100. It was also clarified that the fluctuation field normalized by remanence coercivity increases as the environmental temperature increases for all tapes, indicating that it is a good measure of thermal stability. Activation volumes were also deduced as a function of temperature.

Time decay of magnetic properties in perpendicular magnetic recording media was studied. It was suggested that magnetization in media with a low energy ratio, KV/kT, of 50 is thermally stable in the absence of a demagnetizing field while coercivity exhibits a large time dependence. Magnetization in perpendicular recording media exhibited an appreciable time decay even for films with a large energy ratio of 300. The decay is attributed to the small perpendicular squareness due to a large perpendicular demagnetizing field acting in the media. The recording density dependence of the time decay in the output was explained in terms of the change in the demagnetizing field with the density. It is concluded that the use of media with large squareness as well as large energy ratio effectively reduces time decay in the output.

Small-scale video on demand system will be necessary in the future. Cluster drives, which use optical disk drives, are a good buffer memory for this purpose because the cost per megabyte is low. An ordinary optical cluster drive has many SCSI buses and up to seven optical drives are connected to each SCSI bus. One drive from each bus is assembled to make a group of a cluster drive. The difference betweeen SCSI bus data transfer rate and sustained disk transfer rate enables the cluster drive to be simplified. Several drives on an SCSI bus make a sub-group. The video data is striped onto those sub-groups. When the total data transfer rate from disks within a sub-group exceeds the bus transfer rate, some drives can not acquire the bus. When drives connected to one SCSI bus are not identical, the block size of the data to be recorded on each drive has to be adjusted so that the maximum effective data transfer rate can be obtained. When the cycle times of a slow and fast drive are set identical, the effective data transfer rate is maximum, where one cycle consists of command time, minimum bus free time, disk read time, and bus transfer time.

Given the tremendous growth in the cellular phone system and the Personal Hadny-phone System (PHS), it is to be expected that demands for mobile computing using those wireless infrastructures, that is mobile computer access, will dramatically increase. This paper describes high-quality and high-speed data transmission technology for PHS mobile computing and current PHS data transmission standardization activities. Furthermore, wireless agent communication and a service example are presented together with the concept of background communication for the coming wireless multimedia services.

This paper compares three cell transfer quality control schemes, namely HPS, DAS and ORS, which integrate a preventive congestion control and a reactive congestion control in ATM switch. Simulation results showed that ORS achieves the largest network utilization, and HPS provides enough large throughput compared with DAS only when many VBR connections are multiplexed.

We propose a new bit timing recovery (BTR) scheme, what we call Step Sampled BTR (SSBTR), that can lower the sampling clock frequency and shorten the clock phase convergence time, for burst signals in high bit rate wireless access systems. The SSBTR scheme has the following characteristics. A sine wave resulting from the BTR code passing through a Nyquist Transmission System is always used, the sampling clock has a lower frequency than the system clock, and the clock phase of Intermediate Frequency (IF) signal input can be estimated from as few as 3 sampled data. The SSBTR scheme corrects the clock phase only once in a burst signal. Therefore, in some wireless access systems, some kind of operation must be performed after the SSBTR, in order to deal with long burst signals, instability of the system clock, and so on. In other wireless access systems that do not have these problems, clock phase can be fixed by the SSBTR scheme alone. The preformance of the SSBTR scheme with respect to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) was examined by computer simulation. In addition, when SSBTR is implemented in hardware, there are imperfections in the circuitry that lead to phase estimation error and thus deterioration, so we studied the effects of several such imperfections by computer simulation. The results of these simulations clarify the performance of the SSBTR scheme.

This paper proposes the use, in integrated wireless systems, of the Reserved Idle Signal Multiple Access with Collision Resolution (R-ISMA/CR) protocol for applications in future multimedia mobile communications. It is applied to the integrated voice and data wireless system. Moreover, the consideration is made of the integrated voice and the low-bit video wireless system in R-ISMA/CR. To integrate video we employed not only a packed discard for video packets when the video packet delay is more than a threshold value, but also the connection packet (CP) technique for improving the channel utilization. Finally the integration of voice, data, and low-bit-video wireless system in R-ISMA/CR is considered. The performance are evaluated mainly by simulations.

Given the recent advances in telecommunication services, new service operations are needed that support not only existing network services, but also information and communication providing services, such as multimedia services. It is particularly important that service usage information should be gathered, processed, analyzed and presented properly for smooth service provisioning and business support. This paper defines a reference model for service usage information and an implementation model for establishing the functions needed to gather and process this information. The results of an service operation system as implemented in NTT multimedia service trials, currently underway in the city of Urayasu, are also described.

This paper discribes a shared medium access control protocol for residential home and small business customer ATM network application with distributed high-speed multimedia services. This protocol offers global fairness for the whole network with a CG (Centralized Grant) signal and, at the same time, offers local fairness between nodes with DG (Distributed Grant) signals. The DG signal is only meaningful to the next neighboring node. The local fairness is kept between two nodes in distributed way, but this distributed local fairness helps to keep the global fairness. Because the DG signal is related to the passed DG signal from the neighbor node. This protocol is rather simple but shows high performance than the already announced protocols.

This paper optimizes a hierarchical image transmission system based on the hierarchical modulation scheme in a band-limited Rayleigh fading channel. Authors analyze relations between hierarchical parameters and the image quality, and show that the existence of optimum hierarchical parameter that maximizes the received image quality.

Recent technology innovations have increased the study on wireless LAN (Local Area Network). Also, improved computing power of end user has needed the distributed communication environment. However, conventional access protocols (TDMA, CSMA/CA and CDMA) have some problems such as the degradation of channel utilization, necessity of control station and code reuse. Therefore, we propose new multiple access scheme, Hybrid Reservation CDMA based on our previous work, DR-CDMA. Proposed method for distributed/central wireless LAN architecture provides, distributed channel access mechanism, code reuse method and internetworking method with conventional wire-based LAN. In proposed mechanism, efficient channel utilization could be obtained by minimizing overhead. Also, variable length frame from upper layer could be transmitted without segmentation. Moreover, nodes are serviced based on priority. In view of management, insertion of new node could be done easily in proposed HR-CDMA in proposed method due to its variable length property which can encapsulate conventional LAN frame. According to computer simulation, it has been shown that performances of proposed method are better than those of reservation TDMA bitmap protocol with respect to delay and throughput characteristics in the distributed environments as well as interworking environments between wire and wireless LAN.

This paper presents severl radio resource scheduling algorithms which aim to provide best-effort service for non-real-time unit-oriented, or message traffic. The objective of resource scheduling algorithm is to distribute radio resources between competing message traffic sources while attaining throughput as high and fair as possible for each source without any explicit quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee. Computer simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance in terms of the average of allocation plus transfer delay, the average of throughput, the variance of throughput, and the usage of resources. The message-size distributions of homepages in World-Wide-Web and e-mails obtained by actual measurement are used. Message size-based resource scheduling algorithms are found to provide high and fair throughput as well as efficient use of the resources.

A leaky-bucket-with-gate algorithm is proposed to control connection-setup congestion in telecommunication networks providing multimedia services, in place of the call-gapping algorithm used in telephone networks. Multimedia services may use more than one connection simultaneously, while standard telephone services use only one connection at a time. A set of connections used to construct a multimedia service is called a correlated connection group, and the setup requests of such a group form correlated request group. A correlated request group is assumed to be accepted into the network only when all the connection-setup requests for the group are accepted. In this paper, the proposed leaky-bucket-with-gate algorithm, a pure leaky-bucket algorithm, and a call-gapping algorithm are evaluated by simulating traffic with a mix of correlated and uncorrelated connection-setup requests, which models setup requests for video conferencing and telephone services. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm accepts correlated request groups more efficiently than the pure leaky-bucket and call-gapping algorithms under the simulated traffic conditions, except when the interarrival time in a correlated request group is longer than the acceptance interval. We also present queueing analysis for determining the control parameters in the proposed algorithm. Implementation of this algorithm will facilitate the handling of both setup request traffic for correlated connection groups and for uncorrelated connections in multimedia networks.

For two decades, our colleagues and we have been developing our multiple learning environments in mathematical education for upper secondary school learners, and have been reporting our learner-centered system in the latest four WCCE Conferences (WCCE/1981/1985/1990/1995). In our latest learning multimedia system, individual learners have to meet a complex network structure in which objectives are arranged in the form of non-linear linking and to proceed actively to their own goals. In order to support their exploring learning, we developed several instructional navigation tools from an instructional view point. This paper presents our instructional navigation technology and its tools. The feature of our present system is to provide a supportive environment where individual learners can set up their own goals, create their own paths for their goals through instructional materials, and construct their own instructional structure based on instructional strategies. This feature is remarkably different from a traditional CAI system in which learners are only directed through the courseware via a linear selection of menus. Also this feature fundamentally differs from general navigation technologies by which a user is able to traverse a series of nodes among non-linear network structure, because our navigation must present individual learners with some easily learnable sequences of objectives based on their object and interest. For this purpose, this system has three chracteristic technologies, i.e. focusing, sequencing and clustering ones. These are very useful for them to make their decisions in order to reach their own goals. This paper consists of (1) ideas of instructional navigation, (2) map technology and (3) navigation technology.

In recent years, and increasing number of studies have been reported regarding multimedia LANs that integrate voice, data and video communications. The Movable Boundary method has been suggested as a way to integrate circuit and packet switching. However, how this can be practically managed, especially for multimedia LANs, is not clear. Working under the assumption that an optical loop network in used as a multimedia LAN, we propose Hybrid Allocation as a new Movable Boundary method. Hybrid Allocation features traffic prediction for circuit switching calls, and timeslot allocation close to the boundary of circuit and packet switching areas. Evaluations of traffic simulation and network efficiency show it to be a promising architecture for integrating circuit and packet switching on a multimedia LAN.

This paper proposes a new AFC (automatic frequency control) circuit employing a double-product type frequency discriminator to enable fast acquisition in very-low CNR (carrier to noise power ratio) environments. The frequency step responses of the proposed AFC circuit are theoretically analyzed. In addition this paper evaluates the performance of the proposed AFC circuit by computer simulation in very-low CNR environments. The simulation results confirm that click noise at the frequency discriminator causes large frequency tracking error and that this error can be improved by increasing the delay time of the double-product type frequency discriminator. The frequency error can be also reduced by introducing the proposed frequency discriminator to modify the frequency error detection performance. The acquisition time of the proposed AFC circuit can be reduced by about 100 symbols compared to the conventional cross-product type AFC circuit.

Various approaches to reduce access network cost are discussed with emphasis on system and component technologies. On-going access network opticalization subjects are discussed with respect to PDS-based access systems.

We studied three types of lasers emitting narrow beam divergence of output light: 1) a spot-size converter integrated laser diodes (SS-LDs) with a vertically tapered waveguide, 2) one with a laterally tapered waveguide, and 3) one consisting of a small cross section of active region. We compared them with regard to their performance in coupling efficiency to a cleaved single mode fiber, threshold current, output power, and reliability. Both the spot-size converted integrated lasers with vertically and laterally tapered waveguide repeatedly provided low threshold currents of as low as 6 mA and low coupling loss to the fiber of 1.2 to 2.5 dB in two inch wafer processes. As a result of the aging test, the SS-lasers were predicted to have the same degradation rate as a conventional buried heterostructure laser. The laser having a small cross section of active layer also has low coupling loss and high efficiency up to 85.

Key aspects and technologies of future satellite communications are discussed toward multimedia era. Onboard processing called the switchboard in the sky and networking taking full advantage of features peculiar to satellite communications are pointed out as essential technologies to overcome a variety of big challenges for realizing future satellite communications. Several experimental and commercial systems are introduced as the first step toward multimedia era.

Recently, computer communications, especially Internet services, have become popular and as a result, high-speed network access circuits are now desired. NTT has developed an economical and high-speed multimedia computer network, combining satellite and terrestrial circuits. The satellite circuit transmission rate is approximately 30-Mbit/s. To select IP packets from such high-speed satellite circuits, this system employs the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) in the satellite section and we have developed a new economical satellite circuit receive adapter (SRA) for the satellite section. This paper describes the system configurations and the key network control technologies for multi-link routing, high speed processing and broadcasting.