A new multi-functional card with a display, sounder and input keys, and related communication equipment, including a microwave base station and a contactless surface reader/writer, have been developed to perform the functions of positioning, paging, returning a message and identity certification. We confirmed that a prototype subsystem was capable of providing a simple and automatic call forwarding service. The multi-functional card as an ID card and a personal data terminal, and its subsystem can provide new personal services for a multimedia office.

A miniature transceiver, including highly integrated MMIC front-end, for 1.9 GHz band personal handy phone system(PHS) has been developed. The terminal, adopting direct conversion transmitter and receiver technology, consists of four high-density RF circuit modules and a digital signal processing LSI with 2.7 V power supply. The four functional modules are a power amplifier, a transmitter,a receiver, and a frequency synthesizer. Each functional module includes one IC chip and passive LCR components connected with solder bumps on module substrate. The experimental miniature PHS handset has been fabricated to verify the design concepts of the miniature transceiver. The total volume of the developed PHS terminal is 60cc, including the 12cc front-end which comprises the four RF functional circuit modules. The air interface connection with the PHS base station simulator has been confirmed.

Multiple TDMA bursts assignment between a base station and a personal terminal will be required for multimedia communications that offers high speed signal transmission such as voice and data simultaneous transmission. This paper proposes a reliable packet transmission method for TDMA based wireless multimedia communications. The proposed method employs an adaptive transmission rate control according to the packet length and a burst diversity technique is applied to improve the frame error rate of a packet. The frame error rate performance has been approximated theoretically by using fade- and infade-duration statistics of a Rayleigh fading channel and a computer simulation has been carried out for two control channels, FACCH/SACCH (Fast/Slow Associated Control CHannel) in the PHS as well as GSM. Both results indicate that the frame error rate is dramatically improved, about one order, when two bursts have different frequency and improved by about 25% when the two bursts have the same frequency.

This paper describes a CDMA cellular system based on adaptive interference cancellation (CDMA-AIC) with a large capacity. In the CDMA-AIC, each base station employs a single-user type adaptive interference canceller (AIC), which consists of a fractionally chip-spaced code-orthogonalizing filter (COF) and a coherent detector. The AIC adaptively removes power-dominant multiple-access interferences (MAIs) in the cellular system, regardless of whether they are intra-cell interferences or inter-cell interferences, without any information about them, such as spreading codes, signal received timings and channel parameters. Evaluation under the multiple-cell environment demonstrates that the reverse link capacity of the CDMA-AIC with QPSK modulation is 3.6 times as large as the capacity of the CDMA without MAI cancellation. Further, the capacity is less sensitive to transmission power control errors than that of the conventional CDMA systems.

A new high performance digital signal processor (DSP) that lowers power consumption, reduces chip count, and enables system cost savings for wireless communications applications was developed. The new device contains high performance, hard-wired functionality with a specialized instruction set to effectively implement the worldwide digital cellular standard algorithms, including GSM, PDC and NADC, and also features both full rate and future half rate processing by software modules. The device provides a wider operating voltage ranging from 1.5 V to 5.5 V using 5 V process based on the market requirement of 5 V supply voltage, even though a power supply voltage in most applications will be shifted to 3 V. Several circuits was newly developed to achieve low power consumption and high speed operation at both 5 V and 3 V process using the same data base. The device also features over 50 MIPS of processing power with low power consumption and 100 nA stand-by current at either 3 V or 5 V. One remarkable advantage is a flexible CPU core approach for the future spin-off devices with different ROM/RAM configurations and peripheral modules without requiring any CPU design changes. This paper describes the architecture of a lower power and high speed design with effective hardware and software modules implementations.

This paper describes 950 GHz power performance of double-doped AlGaAs/InGaAs/AlGaAs heterojunction field-effect transistors (HJFET) operated at a drain bias voltage ranging from 2.5 to 3.5 V. The developed 1.0 µm gatelength HJFET exhibited a maximum drain current (Imax) of 500 mA/mm, a transconductance (gm) of 300 mS/mm, and a gate-to-drain breakdown voltage of 11 V. Operated at 3.0 V, a 17.5 mm gate periphery HJFET showed 1.4 W Pout and -50.3 dBc adjacent channel leakage power at a 50 kHz off-carrier frequency from 950 MHz with 50% PAE. Harmonic balance simulations revealed that the flat gm characteristics of the HJFET with respect to gate bias voltage are effective to suppress intermodulation distortion under large signal operation. The developed HJFET has great potential for small-sized digital cellular power applications operated at a low DC supply voltage.

The distributed measurement-based quasi-fixed frequency assignment (also known as quasi-static adaptive frequency assignment-QSAFA) methodology is a practical solution for frequency assignment in the emerging TDMA personal communications networks (PCN/PCS). Five different QSAFA algorithms are studied in this paper under different interference threshold settings. It is found that a simple aggressive algorithm without using a threshold (LIA-Least Interference Algorithm) performs the best under the conditions studied. The performance of this algorithm is also justified by the theoretical proof presented at the end of this paper.

This paper proposes a symbol rate controlled adaptive modulation/TDMA/TDD for future wireless personal communication systems. The proposed system controls the symbol rate according to the channel conditions to achieve wide dynamic range of the modulation parameter control as well as to improve the delay spread immunity. The main purpose of the proposed system is to increase the data throughput with keeping a certain transmission quality, especially in frequency selective fading environments. For this purpose, the proposed system predicts the C/N0 (carrier power-to-noise spectral density ratio) and the delay spread separately, and selects the optimum symbol rate that gives the maximum bit rate within a given bandwidth satisfying the required BER. The simulated results show that the proposed system can achieve higher transmission quality in comparison with the fixed symbol rate transmission system in both flat Rayleigh and frequency selective fading environments. The results also show that the proposed system is very effective to achieve higher bit rate transmission in frequency selective fading environments.

Mobile communications have been developing rapidly in recent years. In Japan, a new digital cellular system and digital trunked radio system were introduced. Soon a new personal communication system and road information system will be introduced. Other than those systems, many new mobile communication systems are being developed. These are new pager systems, future public land mobile communication systems, wireless card system and anti-collision radar system etc.

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of handoff schemes in microcellular personal communication systems (PCS) which cater to both pedestrian and vehicular users. Various performance parameters, including blocking of new calls,channel utilization, handoff blocking and call termination probabilities for each user type are evaluated. We study different queuing disciplines for handoff calls and their impact on system performance. We also study the tradeoff in handoff blocking and call termination probabilities between user types as the handoff traffic carried by the system from each user type is varied.

The advance of mobile network and radio techniques has been rapidly expanding the service area for mobile terminals. Thus, mobile communications have been devoted to the improvement of terminal mobility (TM). Recently, the personal mobility (PM) concept appeared which gives a freedom to use personal telecommunication numbers at any terminal. Therefore, mobile network must next enable a user to access telecommunication services with his/her personal telecommunication number from any terminal at any geographic location. In other words, the mobile network must implement universal mobility (UM) that integrates TM and PM. This paper first provides a definition of UM. Next, it describes the identity and number configurations for UM and then presents network techniques for UM, i.e., the network architecture and UM management procedures. It also presents the current status of standardization on UM in the Personal Digital Cellular system (PDC) and Future Public Land Mobile Telecommunication Systems (FPLMTS).

When we design a human interface of a computer-mediated communication (CMC) system, it is important to take a socio-behavioral approach for understanding the nature of the human communication. From this point of view, we conducted experimental observations and post-experimental questionnaires to investigate communicative characteristics in a teleconference using Fujitsu Habitat" visual telecommunication software. We experimentally held the following three kinds of small-group conferences consisting of five geographically distributed participants: (a) teleconference using a visual telecommunication system (Fujitsu Habitat"), (b) teleconference using a real-time keyboard telecommunication system of NIFTY-Serve and (c) live face to face physical conference. Analyses were made on (1) effects of the media on utterance behaviors of conference members, and (2) satisfaction of conference members with communicative functions of the media. Satisfaction was measured by a seven-level rating scale. We found that participants in a telconference held by using Habitat showed significant differences in contents of utterances and the rating of satisfaction with nine communicative functions compared with those of conferences held by using a real-time keyboard telecommunication system and a live face-to-face conference. These results suggest some features that could facilitate multi-participant on-line electronic conferences and conversations.

Development of a large-scale mobile communications network (IMN: Intelligent Mobile communications Network), as an infrastructure integrating multimedia functions, is indispensable for the support of future mobile communication services aiming toward "personalization," "intelligence," and "multimedia services." This paper discusses the aims of mobile communications and the outline of network technology aspects of PDC (Personal Digital Cellular) network which is currently in service. In addition, the future prospect of mobile communication technologies is discussed with special focuses on the support of universal mobility, network architecture including mobile communications platform, and multimedia technologies in the transport and access systems.

This paper proposes an adaptive modulation/TDMA scheme to achieve high capacity personal multi-media communication systems. TDMA is employed to cope with various bit rate for multi-media services. The modulation scheme is selected from 1/4-rate QPSK, 1/2-rate QPSK, QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM according to the received C/IC (power ratio of the desired signal to the co-channel interference) and the delay spread. The spectral efficiency is evaluated by using the simulated bit error rate (BER) performance as well as the cumulative distribution of the C/IC with parameters of cell configurations. The results show that the spectral efficiency of the proposed scheme is 3.5 times higher than that of the conventional QPSK systems at the outage probability of 10%, and the effect is more remarkable at lower outage probability. The results also show that the proposed adaptive modulation is effective in improving delay spread immunity.

This paper proposes a semi-autonomous frame synchronization scheme for a TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access)-TDD (Time Division Duplexing) personal communication system to realize accurate frame synchronization in a simple manner. The proposed scheme selects specific adjacent base stations by the station indicator (SID), carries out high resolution frame timing control, and compensates the propagation delay between base stations by using geographical data. This autonomously synchronizes all base stations to each other. Computer simulation and analysis results confirm the accurate and stable TDMA frame synchronization of all base stations even in fading environments.

In this paper, we propose DSVMA (Data Steal into Voice Multiple Access) scheme for integration of voice and data in wireless information networks. By using speech activity detectors and effective downstream control signals, DSVMA enables data terminals to transmit multi-packet messages when voice terminals are in silent periods. The S-G (throughput versus offered load) performance of the DSVMA system and the blocking probabilities of both the second generation systems and the DSVMA systems are evaluated by the static analysis. A dynamic analysis of a system with finite number of terminals is also presented using an approximate Markov analysis method. Some numerical examples are given in the paper. As a result, it is shown that DSVMA can improve the channel utility efficiency of a circuit-switched TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) wireless communication system and is directly applicable for second generation wireless information systems.

This paper proposes a group demodulator that employs multi-symbol chirp Fourier transform to demodulate pulse shaped and time asynchronous signals without degradation; this is not possible with conventional group demodulators based on chirp Fourier transform. Computer simulation results show that the bit error rate degradation of the proposed group demodulator at BER=10-3 is less than 0.3dB even when a root Nyquist (α=0.5) filter is used as the transmission pulse shaping filter and the symbol timing offset between the desired channel and the chirp sweep is half the symbol period.

There has been growing interest in Broadband ISDN (B-ISDN) based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technologies, since ATM is expected to support a wide range of applications through high-speed and flexible multimedia communication capabilities. This paper reviews and discusses technical issues on multimedia communication protocols and services from the integration points of view of computer and communication technologies. An ISDN-based distributed multimedia and multi-party desktop conference system called MERMAID is introduced as an example which offers highly-sophisticated functions for remote collaborations among multiple users. This system, which was developed in early 1989 and has been used for daily research work since then, involves B-ISDN key technologies related to multimedia and multicast protocols, and computer architecture for groupware applications.

This paper first proposes a fast fingerprint identification method based on a weighted-mean of binary image, and further investigates optimization of the weights. The proposed method uses less computer memory than the conventional pattern matching method, and takes less computation time than both the feature extraction method and the pattern matching method. It is particularly effective on the fingerprints with a small angle of inclination. In order to improve the identification precision of the proposed basic method, three schemes of modifying the proposed basic method are also proposed. The performance of the proposed basic method and its modified schemes is evaluated by theoretical analysis and computer experiment using the fingerprint images recorded from a fingerprint read-in device. The numerical results showed that the proposed method using the modified schemes can improve both the true acceptance rate and the false rejection rate with less memory and complexity in comparison with the conventional pattern matching method and the feature extraction method.

In the PICASSO, a system for the facial caricature generation, as the basic mechanisms to extract the individuality features of faces and to deform the features have been already introduced, it is expected to realize an autonomous mechanism to evaluate facial caricatures. The evaluation should be based on the framework of human visual cognition. In the PICASSO, some visual illusions such as the Wundt-Fick illusion and the Ponzo illusion for example, are applied to evaluate the shapes of the facial parts such as eyebrows, nose, mouth and face contour, in the deformation process. In many cases, as well-deformed caricatures are evaluated to be successful, it is confirmed that the utilization of the visual illusion is effective to evaluate the results of caricatures. In this paper, some experimental results are presented together with the definition of the evaluation measures and the further subjects.