Technology for sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication system is now being widely studied. A sub-Terahertz band is expected to play a great role in 6G to enable extremely high data-rate transmission. This paper has two goals. (1) Introduction of 6G concept and propagation characteristics of sub-Terahertz-band radio waves. (2) Performance evaluation of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) based on beamforming in a sub-Terahertz band for smart radio environments (SREs). We briefly review research on SREs with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), and describe requirements and key features of 6G with a sub-Terahertz band. After that, we explain propagation characteristics of sub-Terahertz band radio waves. Important feature is that the number of multipath components is small in a sub-Terahertz band in indoor office environments. This leads to an IRS control method based on beamforming because the number of radio waves out of the optimum beam is very small and power that is not used for transmission from the IRS to user equipment (UE) is little in the environments. We use beams generated by a Butler matrix or a DFT matrix. In simulations, we compare the received power at a UE with that of the upper bound value. Simulation results show that the proposed method reveals good performance in the sense that the received power is not so lower than the upper bound value.

In order to support seamless mobility in the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Architecture we propose the Named-Node Network Architecture (3NA). 3NA introduces two independent namespaces to ICN, the 3N namespace used to uniquely identify nodes within a network and the Point of Attachment (PoA) namespace to identify a node's PoA to the network. The mappings between the two namespaces, along with all the necessary mechanisms to keep the mappings updated over time, are used when routing ICN packets to improve delay and the goodput when either the producer or the consumer are mobile. To support simultaneous producer and consumer mobility, we expand on the 3NA by adding a new Protocol Data Unit (PDU), the DU PDU. The DU PDU permits the encapsulation of ICN packets in a header that has source and destination name fields which belong to 3NA's 3N namespace. The new PDU permits seamless connectivity as long as 3NA's point of attachment signaling is strictly followed. We demonstrate the performance of the DU PDU against our previous defined communication methods and Named Data Networking's (NDN) Smart Flooding forwarding strategy using our open source nnnSIM module for the ns-3 framework. The new PDU outperforms all existing alternatives when the producer or both consumer and provider are mobile, obtaining overall lower mean network delay and higher median goodput.

In this paper, the recent advances in cooperative distributed antenna transmission (CDAT) are introduced for spatial diversity and multi-user spatial multiplexing in 5G mobile communications network. CDAT is an advanced version of the coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission. Space-time block coded transmit diversity (STBC-TD) for spatial diversity and minimum mean square error filtering combined with singular value decomposition (MMSE-SVD) for multi-user spatial multiplexing are described under the presence of co-channel interference from adjacent macro-cells. Blind selected mapping (blind SLM) which requires no side information transmission is introduced in order to suppress the increased peak-to-average signal power ratio (PAPR) of the transmit signals when CDAT is applied. Some computer simulation results are presented to confirm the effectiveness of CDAT techniques.

Currently, many operators worldwide are deploying Long Term Evolution (LTE) to provide much faster access with lower latency and higher efficiency than its predecessors 3G and 3.5G. Meanwhile, the service rollout of LTE-Advanced, which is an evolution of LTE and a “true 4G” mobile broadband, is being underway to further enhance LTE performance. However, the anticipated challenges of the next decade (2020s) are so tremendous and diverse that there is a vastly increased need for a new generation mobile communications system with even further enhanced capabilities and new functionalities, namely a fifth generation (5G) system. Envisioning the development of a 5G system by 2020, at DOCOMO we started studies on future radio access as early as 2010, just after the launch of LTE service. The aim at that time was to anticipate the future user needs and the requirements of 10 years later (2020s) in order to identify the right concept and radio access technologies for the next generation system. The identified 5G concept consists of an efficient integration of existing spectrum bands for current cellular mobile and future new spectrum bands including higher frequency bands, e.g., millimeter wave, with a set of spectrum specific and spectrum agnostic technologies. Since a few years ago, we have been conducting several proof-of-concept activities and investigations on our 5G concept and its key technologies, including the development of a 5G real-time simulator, experimental trials of a wide range of frequency bands and technologies and channel measurements for higher frequency bands. In this paper, we introduce an overview of our views on the requirements, concept and promising technologies for 5G radio access, in addition to our ongoing activities for paving the way toward the realization of 5G by 2020.

It is well known that satellite communications systems are effective and essential communication infrastructure for disaster relief. NICT sent researchers to Tsunami stricken area in March right after the Great East Japan Earthquake and provided broadband satellite communications link to support rescue activities. Through this experience, we learned many kinds of requirements of communications for such purposes. In this paper, we list up the requirements and report what kind of satellite communications technologies are needed, and research and development issues.

Recently, global positioning system (GPS)-enabled mobile units have been popular in wireless mobile communications systems, and thus it becomes possible for mobile units to estimate the velocity before a random access for initiating communications. Motivated by this, we propose a new random access scheme establishing two or more access slot groups corresponding to velocity ranges of mobile units, where each mobile unit attempts a random access only at the slot group corresponding to its current velocity. It gives advantages that access slots can be flexibly grouped according to vehicle traffic conditions and detection algorithms can be optimized to each velocity range.

This paper proposes efficient single-carrier (SC) based multiplexing schemes for Layer 1 (L1)/Layer 2 (L2) control signals in SC-FDMA radio access using DFT-Spread OFDM in the Evolved UTRA uplink. L1/L2 control signals are necessary for key packet access techniques such as downlink scheduling, link adaptation, hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) with soft combining, and for uplink feedback control signals. We first propose a SC-based multiplexing scheme for L1/L2 control signals within a shared data channel for a set of user equipment (UE) that transmits both an uplink shared data channel and L1/L2 control signals within the same subframe. We also propose a multiplexing scheme for L1/L2 control signals without uplink data transmission that takes advantage of intra-subframe frequency hopping (FH) using multiple exclusively-assigned time-frequency resource blocks (RBs) to obtain a frequency diversity gain. Furthermore, we propose an orthogonal CDMA-based multiplexing scheme using cyclic shifts of a constant amplitude zero auto-correlation (CAZAC) sequence for L1/L2 control signals from different UEs within the same narrowband time-frequency RB. Computer simulation results show that the proposed SC-based multiplexing scheme for the L1/L2 control signals within the shared data channel achieves a higher user throughput than a multicarrier-based multiplexing scheme. The results also show that the proposed multiplexing scheme for the L1/L2 control signals that takes advantage of the intra-subframe FH for the UE without uplink data transmission achieves high quality reception through large frequency diversity gain. Furthermore, we show that the proposed cyclic-shift based orthogonal CDMA multiplexing is effective in the multiplexing of multiple L1/L2 control signals from different UEs within the same RB.

This paper proposes a novel MIMO system that introduces a heterogeneous stream (HTS) scheme and a blind signal detection method for mobile radio communications. The HTS scheme utilizes different modulation or coding methods for different MIMO streams, and the blind detection method requires no training sequences for signal separation, detection, and channel estimation. The HTS scheme can remove the ambiguity in identifying separated streams without unique words that are necessary in conventional MIMO blind detection. More specifically, two examples of HTS are considered: modulation type HTS (MHTS) and timing-offset type HTS (THTS). MHTS, which utilizes different modulation constellations with the same bandwidth for different streams, has been previously investigated. This paper proposes THTS which utilizes different transmission timing with the same modulation. THTS can make the blind detection more robust and effective with fractional sampling. The blind joint processing of detection and channel estimation performs adaptive blind MIMO-MLSE and is derived from an adaptive blind MLSE equalizer that employs the recursive channel estimation with the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse. Computer simulations show that the proposed system can achieve superior BER performance with Eb/N0 degradation of 1 dB in THTS and 2.5 dB in MHTS compared with the ideal maximum likelihood detection.

This paper proposes a new control scheme in which the base station (BS) controls terminal's transmit beamforming in time-division duplex (TDD)/multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. In the proposed scheme, the BS transmits pilot signals using appropriate downlink beams to instruct a terminal on target transmit beamforming. Using responses of the downlink pilot signals, the terminal can perform transmit beamforming close to the target one. Our theoretical investigation reveals that the BS can control multiple terminals' transmit beamforming simultaneously. Furthermore, an efficient signal processing at the terminal is investigated to obtain precise weight of transmit beamforming in noise environments. Numerical results show that the terminal can perform precise transmit beamforming close to the target one in noise environments. It is also shown that the amount of downlink control signalling in the proposed scheme is much less than that in codebook-based approach.

Comparison of the electromagnetic characteristics of a monopole-type wire antenna (MTWA) and an inverted-F wire antenna (IFWA) is performed based on numerical and experimental results. Radiation characteristics, when the handset model is located in the vicinity of a head phantom or in free space, are also investigated. The gain of 8.27 dBi is achieved at 3.4 GHz for the MTWA with the head phantom.

In this letter we investigated the packet transmission control in downlink CDMA cellular systems. The downlink packet transmission control scheme based on the soft handoff status was proposed to enhance the system performance. The proposed scheme controls the downlink packet transmissions by employing a transmission window which is individually resolved to each mobile station according to its propagation condition and soft handoff status. Computer simulation shows that compared with the conventional scheme the proposed scheme improved the delay performance and fairness of service in packet reception.

Receiver enhancement at mobile terminals such as using receiver diversity is a way of achieving greater downlink capacity. The enhancement, however, is achieved not instantaneously by a network operator but gradually by the individual users that choose and purchase their own mobile terminals. We investigate in this letter the effect of gradually introducing enhanced receivers at mobiles in different locations. With greedy scheduling, capacity, fairness and coverage are quantified and numerically compared according to locations of enhanced mobiles. The results show that the enhancement made at mobiles nearer to the base provides the greater capacity but this capacity-driving introduction of the enhancement makes the fairness and the coverage poorer.

This paper studies a multiband mobile communication system to support both high data rate services and wide service coverage, using high and low frequency resources with different propagation characteristics. In the multiband system, multiple frequency bands are managed by a base station and one of the frequency bands is adaptively allocated to a terminal depending on his channel quality. By limiting the low frequency resources to a terminal not covered by the higher frequencies, the presented multiband system can accommodate many terminals providing wide coverage area, as if all radio resources have low frequency. From numerical results, the multiband system can provide wide service coverage area for much larger number of terminals than conventional systems. It is also found that an appropriate balance of multiple frequency resources is essential to achieve high capacity.

It was previously shown that the number of array elements must exceed the number of sources for multiple target direction of arrival (DOA) tracking. This is clearly not practical for code-division multiple access (CDMA) communications since the number of mobile users is very large. To overcome the restriction, adaptive angle tracking approaches employing the code-matched filters and parallel Kalman/H∞ algorithms are presented in this paper. The proposed approaches are applied to the base station of a mobile communication system. Different from Kalman prediction algorithm which minimize the squared tracking error, the adaptive H∞ filtering algorithm is a worst case optimization. It minimizes the effect of the worst disturbances (including modeling error of direction matrix models and array structure imperfection, process noise, and measurement noise). Hence, the difficult problem of tracking the crossing mobiles can be successfully handled by using the code-matched filters. Computer simulation is provided for illustrating the effectiveness of the adaptive angle tracking approaches.

When an application code is downloaded from an unknown server to the mobile device, it is important to authenticate the code. Usually, code execution is overlapped with downloading to reduce transfer/invocation delay. In this letter, we present an efficient code authentication scheme that permits overlapping of execution and downloading when the sequence of code execution is determined during the execution time. The proposed scheme is based on authentication trees. Compared with the tree chaining scheme, the proposed scheme has lower communication overhead and shorter average verification delay. Also, the computation cost of the proposed scheme on the receiver is much smaller than that of the tree chaining scheme.

This paper proposes a scattered-pilot-OFDM reception scheme employing turbo inter-carrier interference (ICI) cancellation in the fast varying fading environments of mobile communications. In the OFDM transmission, the orthogonality among the subcarriers cannot hold due to large Doppler shift, and the OFDM signal suffers from severe degradation due to ICI. The proposed receiver carries out two modes: (i) a coherent detection (CD) mode, and (ii) a turbo ICI cancellation (TC) mode. Initially, the receiver performs the CD mode. When any decision errors are detected, it shifts from the CD mode to the TC one that carries out both the ICI cancellation and the channel estimation by using the decoder output (the log likelihood ratio). In addition, the iteration of the TC mode can improve the accuracy of the channel estimation and ICI cancellation ability. Computer simulations following specifications for the mobile reception mode in the digital terrestrial television broadcasting demonstrate that the receiver can effectively cancel ICI due to the fast varying fading, and that its average BER performance is much better than that of CD.

In multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) systems, the orthogonality among the spreading codes is destroyed because the channels exhibit frequency-selective fading and the despreading stage performs gain control; that is, inter-code interference (ICI) can significantly degrade system performance. This paper proposes an optimum spreading code assignment method that reflects our analysis of ICI for up and downlink MC-CDMA cellular systems over correlated frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. At first, we derive theoretical expressions for the desired-to-undesired signal power ratio (DUR) as a quantitative representation of ICI; computer simulation results demonstrate the validity of the analytical results. Next, based on the ICI imbalance among code pairs, we assign specific spreading codes to users to minimize ICI (in short, to maximize the multiplexing performance); our proposed method considers the quality of service (QoS) policy of users or operators. We show that the proposed method yields better performance, in terms of DUR, than the conventional methods. The proposed method can maximize the multiplexing performance of a MC-CDMA cellular system once the channel model, spreading sequence, and combining strategy have been set. Three combining strategies are examined at the despreading stage for the uplink, equal gain combining (EGC), orthogonality restoring combining (ORC), and maximum ratio combining (MRC), while two are considered for the downlink, EGC and MRC.

We propose a novel handover initiation algorithm based on available bit rate and timing constraint criterion for multimedia capable cellular systems. Computer simulations are performed to evaluate the handover rate and handover initiation delay. Numerical results show that handover must be initiated at different positions for different services to maintain the required quality of service requirements.

In this paper, we propose a simple and accurate transfer function model of the power amplifiers for mobile communications. Detail analysis yields a generalized model for AM/AM characteristics in classes AB, B, and C. The analysis includes the effect of drain current variation with input level variation. This model introduces a loadline variation ratio to indicate the change of drain current and to represent the operation classes in a small signal region. Further discussion leads to simplified approximate equations for the AM/AM characteristics, and the estimation procedures for the simplified model parameters. Using the derived procedures, an efficient power amplifier employing pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (PHEMT) is fabricated for the 2 GHz band. Finally, the various characteristics given by the model, simulator and measurements are compared and found to agree well in the range of 20 dB below the saturated output level. The model is very effective for characterizing the power amplifiers that are used in linear compensation techniques such as predistortion methods, due to its severe nonlinearity of AM/AM and AM/PM characteristics.

Channel estimation is one of the key technologies in mobile communications. Channel estimation is critical in providing high data rate services and to overcome fast fading in very high-speed mobile communications. This paper presents a novel channel estimation based on hybrid spreading of I and Q signals (CEHS). Simulation results show that it can effectively mitigate the influence of fast fading and enable to provide high data rates for very high speed mobile systems.