In classical routing protocols, geographical distances/locations are typically used as the metric to select the best route, under the assumption that shorter distances exhibit lower energy consumption and nodes within the communication range of the sender can receive packets with a certain success probability. However, in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), sound propagation in the ocean medium is more complex than that in the air due to many factors, including sound speed variations and the interaction of sound waves with the sea surface and floor, causing the sound rays to bend. Therefore, propagation of sound is anisotropic in water, and may cause a phenomenon called shadow zone where nodes in the communication range of the sender cannot hear any signal. This renders conventional routing protocols no longer energy-efficient. In this paper, we make use of the ray-model to account for the environment-dependent behavior of the underwater channel, re-define nodes' one-hop neighbors based on signal attenuation rather than geographical distance, and design a distributed energy-efficient routing protocol for UASNs. Results show that our ray-model-based routing policy consistently outperforms the shortest path policy, and performs very close to the optimal one in several scenarios.

A use of ultra wideband (UWB) technology within spacecrafts has been proposed with a view to partially replacing wired interface buses with wireless connections. Adoption of wireless technologies within the spacecrafts could contribute to reduction in cable weight (and launching cost as a result), reduction in the cost of manufacture, more flexibility in layout of spacecraft subsystems, and reliable connections at rotary, moving, and sliding joints. However, multipath propagation in semi-closed conductive enclosures, such as spacecrafts, restricts the link performance. In this paper, UWB and narrowband propagation were measured in a UWB frequency band (from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, the full-band UWB approved in the United States) within a small spacecrafts and a shield box of the same size. While narrowband propagation resulted in considerable spatial variations in propagation gain due to interferences caused by multipath environments, UWB yielded none. This implies that the UWB systems have an advantage over narrowband from a viewpoint of reducing fading margins. Throughputs exceeding 80 Mb/s were obtained by means of commercially-available UWB devices in the spacecraft. Path gains and throughputs were also measured for various antenna settings and polarizations. Polarization configurations were found to produce almost no effect on average power delay profiles and substantially small effects on the throughputs. Significantly long delay spreads and thus limited link performance are caused by a conductive enclosure (the shield box) without apertures on the surfaces. Even in such an environment, it was found that delay spreads can be suppressed by partially paneling a radio absorber on the inner surfaces. More than 96 Mb/s throughputs were attained when the absorber panel covered typically 4% of the total inner surface area.

We propose a novel propagation measurement scheme for terrestrial TV signal indoor reception based on a virtual array technique. The system proposed in this paper carries out two-branch recording of target signals and the reference signal. By using the signal phase reference in the reference signal, we clarify the spatial propagation characteristics obtained from the two-dimensional virtual array outputs. Outdoor measurements were performed first to investigate the validity of the proposed measurement system. The results confirm its effectiveness in accurately determining the direction-of-arrival (DOA). We then investigated the propagation characteristics in an indoor environment. The angular spectrum obtained showed clear wave propagation structure. Thus, our proposed system is promising as a very accurate measurement tool for indoor propagation analysis.

We examine the relationship between 116 VHF sensor events recorded by the VHF sensor on the Maido-1 satellite and lightning strokes detected by the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) to show that most of the VHF sensor events were caused by lightning discharges. For each VHF sensor event, the WWLLN events within 1400 km from the subsatellite point and within 1 sec, 30 sec, and 300 sec of the VHF sensor trigger time are analyzed. We find that the coincidence rates in the North and South American continents, and in Southeast/East Asia and the Australian continent are greater than 0.90. Those in the African and European continents, and in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are less than 0.61. These high enough coincidence rates indicate that the VHF sensor events were emitted from lightning, although the coincidence rates in the other regions are quite low because of the low detection efficiency of the WWLLN in the regions. We also focus on 6 coincident events measured by both the VHF sensor and the WWLLN. The incidence angles of the EM waves for the VHF sensor are estimated from the group delay characteristics of the recorded EM waveforms. Compared with the WWLLN lightning locations, the two incidence angles are temporally and spatially coincident. These results indicate that a large fraction of the VHF sensor events are emitted by lightning discharges.

For the modeling of multipath propagation in every wireless systems, the ray tracing method has been widely studied. However, large errors may result due to the approximation of geometrical optics in curved surfaces. This paper therefore focused on the curved surfaces and edges, which are difficult to handle in ray tracing. Examples of curved surfaces can be found in arched cross-section tunnels which are common in highway networks of mountainous areas. The traditional ray tracing method of dividing the curved surface into smaller flat plates is not so accurate as the size of smaller plates may not satisfy the geometrical optics assumption, and the reflection point which satisfies Fermat's principle may not exist. In this work, a new ray tracing method is proposed with 2 contributions. The first one is the implementation of the reflection coefficient for curved surfaces in ray tracing. The second is applying the physical optics method on the caustics region. To evaluate these methods, path gain simulation results for an arched cross-section model are compared with measurements made inside an arched tunnel. To further improve the simulation results, the effect of rough surface is introduced, and the results are again compared with measurement.

Recently much attention is being devoted to a femtocell's potential for improving indoor cellular coverage with the provision of high data rate services in a wireless environment. Femtocells are usually deployed in homes and buildings and overlay existing macrocells, or microcells which cover wider service areas. In such an overlaid network structure, one of the important issues in network planning is the analysis of system capacity achievable by femtocells, which could be significantly affected by indoor radio propagation properties. This paper addresses a typical environmental scenario where a detailed indoor radio propagation model can be adopted. Moreover, a performance evaluation of embedded femteocell networks reflecting various environmental scenarios and factors is provided by the metrics of outage probability, dynamic range of spectral efficiency, and required separation distances for various wall structures, distance, and the number of walls between the home femtocell and the user. Our computer simulation and numerical analysis indicate an outage probability of 1%∼58%, dynamic range of spectral varies from around 2.2 to 7, while the required separation from the macrocell station is 25 m ∼ 327 m. This information could be useful for femtocell network planning.

In this paper, we propose a wireless network coding diversity technique based on hybrid amplify-and-forward/decode-and-forward relay method employing adaptive power control for two-hop wireless networks in order to improve relay node position flexibility. Wireless network coding diversity based on hybrid relay method selects either modulation symbol level wireless network coding diversity or bit sequence level wireless network coding diversity as its wireless network coding diversity scheme according to the cyclic redundancy check result at the relay node. Moreover, the adaptive power control scheme proposed here controls the relay node's transmit power according to its position. Computer simulations verify that wireless network coding diversity based on hybrid relay method employing the adaptive power control scheme can expand the area wherein the relay node can be located while satisfying the required communication quality by 4.56 times compared to the conventional wireless network coding diversity scheme. Therefore, we confirm that our proposed scheme can increase relay node position flexibility.

In this paper, we compare the decoding error rates in the error floors for non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over general linear groups with those for non-binary LDPC codes over finite fields transmitted through the q-ary memoryless symmetric channels under belief propagation decoding. To analyze non-binary LDPC codes defined over both the general linear group GL(m, F2) and the finite field F2m, we investigate non-binary LDPC codes defined over GL(m3, F2m4). We propose a method to lower the error floors for non-binary LDPC codes. In this analysis, we see that the non-binary LDPC codes constructed by our proposed method defined over general linear group have the same decoding performance in the error floors as those defined over finite field. The non-binary LDPC codes defined over general linear group have more choices of the labels on the edges which satisfy the condition for the optimization.

This letter addresses antenna ordering to improve the performance of the MIMO detectors in [4], where two low complexity MIMO detectors have been proposed based on either fully-connected or ring type pair-wise Markov random field (MRF). The former was shown to be better than the latter, while being more complex. The objective of this letter is to make the performance of the detector based on ring-type MRF (with complexity of O(2M 22m)) close to or better than that of fully-connected MRF (with complexity of O(M (M-1)22m)), by applying appropriate antenna ordering. The simulation results validate the proposed antenna ordering methods.

WiMAX wireless communication has been rapidly developed for broadband mobile communication. Mobile WiMAX communication system uses microwave carrier of 2.5 GHz frequency band and modulation is OFDM mainly. By using OFDM technique, WiMAX provide high speed and reliable communication against multi pass interferences due to the presence of obstacles in communication channels. To design excellent high performance mobile communication systems, accurate evaluation of communication system is indispensable. By using parallel FDTD, we studied fundamental characteristics of microwave propagation and scattering in urban area. We also studied wave propagation and scattering by forest and trees using FDTD method. The effects of multiple scattering and attenuation of microwave by forest are severe factors of high speed wireless communications. In this paper, signal propagation and receiving characteristics of OFDM modulated wave are studied by parallel FDTD method. Propagation, reflection, scattering, interference and delay of digital code signals in received code signals are evaluated to show the environmental characteristics. Parallel FDTD methods are applied for signal and noise analysis about several different complex models and inhomogeneous materials such as forests in long distance communication channels.

We consider secret key agreement for multiple terminals based on radio propagation characteristics in a wireless relaying system where more than two terminals communicate with each other via a relay. In this system, the multiple terminals share a common secret key generated from their radio propagation characteristics with the help of the relay in the presence of an eavesdropper. In this paper, we present three secret key agreement schemes: an amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme, a signal-combining amplify-and-forward (SC-AF) scheme, and a multiple-access amplify-and-forward (MA-AF) scheme. The key idea of these schemes is that each terminal shares the fading coefficients between all terminals and the relay, and use them as the source of a secret key. The AF scheme is based on a conventional amplify-and-forward two-way relaying method, whereas in the SC-AF scheme and the MA-AF scheme, we apply the idea of analog network coding to secret key agreement. We analyze eavesdropping strategies and show that the AF scheme is not secure if the eavesdropper is located near the relay and can receive signals from the relay without multipath fading and noise. Simulation results show that the SC-AF and MA-AF schemes are effective.

In this paper, we propose an interleaving updating framework of disparity and confidence map (IUFDCM) for stereo matching to eliminate the redundant and interfere information from unreliable pixels. Compared with other propagation algorithms using matching cost as messages, IUFDCM updates the disparity map and the confidence map in an interleaving manner instead. Based on the Confidence-based Support Window (CSW), disparity map is updated adaptively to alleviate the effect of input parameters. The reassignment for unreliable pixels with larger probability keeps ground truth depending on reliable messages. Consequently, the confidence map is updated according to the previous disparity map and the left-right consistency. The top ranks on Middlebury benchmark corresponding to different error thresholds demonstrate that our algorithm is competitive with the best stereo matching algorithms at present.

Kudekar et al. proved an interesting result in low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes: The belief-propagation (BP) threshold is boosted to the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) threshold by spatial coupling. Furthermore, the authors showed that the BP threshold for code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems is improved up to the optimal one via spatial coupling. In this letter, a phenomenological model for elucidating the essence of these phenomenon, called threshold improvement, is proposed. The main result implies that threshold improvement occurs for spatially-coupled general graphical models.

We have investigated the low-power circuit applicability of hetero-gate-dielectric tunneling field-effect transistors (HG TFETs). Based on the device-level comparison of HG, SiO2-only and high-k-only TFETs, their circuit performance and energy consumption have been discussed. It has been shown that HG TFETs can deliver 14400x higher performance than the SiO2-only TFETs and 17x higher performance than the high-k-only TFETs due to its higher on current and lower capacitance at the same static power, same power supply. It has been revealed that HG TFETs have better voltage scalability than the others. It is because HG TFETs dissipate only 8% of energy consumption of SiO2-only TFETs and 17% of that of high-k-only TFETs under the same performance condition.

Setting relays can address the shadowing problem between a transmitter (Tx) and a receiver (Rx). Moreover, the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technique has been introduced to improve wireless link capacity. The MIMO technique can be applied in relay network to enhance system performance. However, the efficiency of relaying schemes and relay placement have not been well investigated with experiment-based study. This paper provides a propagation measurement campaign of a MIMO two-hop relay network in 5 GHz band in an L-shaped corridor environment with various relay locations. Furthermore, this paper proposes a Relay Placement Estimation (RPE) scheme to identify the optimum relay location, i.e. the point at which the network performance is highest. Analysis results of channel capacity show that relaying technique is beneficial over direct transmission in strong shadowing environment while it is ineffective in non-shadowing environment. In addition, the optimum relay location estimated with the RPE scheme also agrees with the location where the network achieves the highest performance as identified by network capacity. Finally, the capacity analysis shows that two-way MIMO relay employing network coding has the best performance while cooperative relaying scheme is not effective due to shadowing effect weakening the signal strength of the direct link.

An inter-vehicle communication system for the 720 MHz band that is designed to prevent car crashes at intersections has recently been proposed in Japan. This paper presents an analysis of the propagation characteristics of an intersection surrounded by concrete block walls in a residential area. The propagation characteristics were analyzed for the first time using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. We investigated the influence of wall thickness and source locations on the propagation characteristics. The results of our investigation showed that the most commonly used wall thickness and source locations do not strongly affect propagation loss. Furthermore, we analyzed the power delay profile and delay spread by taking into consideration the structure of the concrete block walls.

In this paper, we investigate the error floors of the non-binary low-density parity-check codes transmitted over the binary erasure channels under belief propagation decoding. We propose a method to improve the decoding erasure rates in the error floors by optimizing labels in zigzag cycles in the Tanner graphs of codes. Furthermore, we give lower bounds on the bit and the symbol erasure rates in the error floors. The simulation results show that the presented lower bounds are tight for the codes designed by the proposed method.

In this paper, we apply an improved method for the guiding problem of dielectric waveguide with arbitrary inhomogeneous media along the middle layer introduced the defect layers, and analyzed the propagation characteristics of dielectric waveguide composed of dielectric circular cylinders and the arbitrary inhomogeneous media in the middle layer by using a combination of the improved Fourier series expansion method and multilayer method. Numerical results are given for the propagation constants in the first stop band regions, and the distribution of energy flow for both TE0 and TM0 modes. The influence of permittivity and the shape variation of arbitrary inhomogeneous media are discussed in the first stop band regions.

We describe an efficient algorithm that extracts a connected component of an isosurface, or a contour, from a 3D rectilinear volume data. The efficiency of the algorithm is achieved by three factors: (i) directly working with rectilinear grids, (ii) parallel utilization of a multi-core CPU for extracting active cells, the cells containing the contour, and (iii) parallel utilization of a many-core GPU for computing the geometries of a contour surface in each active cell using CUDA. Experimental results show that our hybrid parallel implementation achieved up to 20x speedup over existing methods on an ordinary PC. Our work coupled with the Contour Tree framework is useful for quickly segmenting, displaying, and analyzing a feature of interest in 3D rectilinear volume data without being distracted by other features.

In this letter, two new network coding (NC) diversity enhancement schemes are introduced for wireless relay systems. Conventional diversity enhancement approaches for relay systems suffer from error propagation at each relay and exhibit second order diversity performance. In the proposed schemes, when a relay experiences a decoding failure, the relay makes a request to have the source transmit the NC frames to the destination in its time slot. Due to this operation, the proposed schemes prevent error propagation and achieve near third order diversity performance. The proposed schemes are compared to conventional schemes based on the derived mathematical error bounds and simulation performance, both of which demonstrate the superiority of the proposed schemes.