In this paper, we have obtained the integral representation for the ground wave propagation over land-to-sea mixed-paths which uses the equivalent current source on an aperture plane. By extending the integral to the complex plane and deforming the integration path into the steepest descent path, we have derived a simple integral representation for the mixed-path ground wave propagation. We have also derived the hybrid numerical and asymptotic representation for an efficient calculation of the ground wave and for easy understanding of the diffraction phenomena. By using the method of the stationary phase applicable uniformly as the stationary phase point approaches the endpoint, we have derived the high-frequency asymptotic solution for the ground wave propagation over the mixed-path. We have confirmed the validity of the various representations by comparing both with the conventional mixed-path theory and with the experimental results performed in Kanto areas including the sea near Tokyo bay. By examining the asymptotic solution in detail, we have found out the cause or the mechanism of the recovery effect occurring on the portion of the sea over the land-to-sea mixed-path.

Ultra wideband (UWB) technologies are expected to be used in ultra-high-speed wireless personal area networks (WPAN) and wireless body area networks (WBAN). UWB human electromagnetic phantoms are useful for performance evaluation of antennas mounted in the vicinity of a human body and channel assessment when a human body blocks a propagation path. Publications on UWB phantoms, however, have been limited so far. This paper describes the development of liquid UWB phantom material (aqueous solution of sucrose) and UWB arm and torso phantoms. The UWB phantoms are not intended to evaluate a specific absorption rate (SAR) in a human body, because UWB devices are supposed to transmit at very low power and thus should pose no human hazard.

Delay profile of ultra-wideband impulse-radio (UWB-IR) indoor channel fluctuates for a physical change such as intruder. This paper investigates a human body detection using the UWB-IR in order to protect a house, not a room, because the radio with high range resolution can penetrate into the inner walls and also the reflected paths from human body are discriminated in time domain. The usefulness is experimentally investigated under a scenario which someone intrudes into a typical house with four rooms and walks around.

In this letter, a recently proposed clustering algorithm named affinity propagation is introduced for the task of speaker clustering. This novel algorithm exhibits fast execution speed and finds clusters with low error. However, experiments show that the speaker purity of affinity propagation is not satisfying. Thus, we propose a hybrid approach that combines affinity propagation with agglomerative hierarchical clustering to improve the clustering performance. Experiments show that compared with traditional agglomerative hierarchical clustering, the hybrid method achieves better performance on the test corpora.

A new ensemble of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for correcting a solid burst erasure is proposed. This ensemble is an instance of a combined matrix ensemble obtained by concatenating some LDPC matrices. We derive a new bound on the critical minimum span ratio of stopping sets for the proposed code ensemble by modifying the bound for ordinary code ensemble. By calculating this bound, we show that the critical minimum span ratio of stopping sets for the proposed code ensemble is better than that of the conventional one with keeping the same critical exponent of stopping ratio for both ensemble. Furthermore from experimental results, we show that the average minimum span of stopping sets for a solid burst erasure of the proposed codes is larger than that of the conventional ones.

In this paper, we propose a method for enhancing performance of a sequential version of the belief-propagation (BP) decoding algorithm, the group shuffled BP decoding algorithm for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. An improved BP decoding algorithm, called the shuffled BP decoding algorithm, decodes each symbol node in serial at each iteration. To reduce the decoding delay of the shuffled BP decoding algorithm, the group shuffled BP decoding algorithm divides all symbol nodes into several groups. In contrast to the original group shuffled BP, which automatically generates groups according to symbol positions, in this paper we propose a method for grouping symbol nodes which generates groups according to the structure of a Tanner graph of the codes. The proposed method can accelerate the convergence of the group shuffled BP algorithm and obtain a lower error rate in a small number of iterations. We show by simulation results that the decoding performance of the proposed method is improved compared with those of the shuffled BP decoding algorithm and the group shuffled BP decoding algorithm.

A Lyapunov-based recurrent neural networks unified power flow controller (UPFC) is developed for improving transient stability of power systems. First, a simple UPFC dynamical model, composed of a controllable shunt susceptance on the shunt side and an ideal complex transformer on the series side, is utilized to analyze UPFC dynamical characteristics. Secondly, we study the control configuration of the UPFC with two major blocks: the primary control, and the supplementary control. The primary control is implemented by standard PI techniques when the power system is operated in a normal condition. The supplementary control will be effective only when the power system is subjected by large disturbances. We propose a new Lyapunov-based UPFC controller of the classical single-machine-infinite-bus system for damping enhancement. In order to consider more complicated detailed generator models, we also propose a Lyapunov-based adaptive recurrent neural network controller to deal with such model uncertainties. This controller can be treated as neural network approximations of Lyapunov control actions. In addition, this controller also provides online learning ability to adjust the corresponding weights with the back propagation algorithm built in the hidden layer. The proposed control scheme has been tested on two simple power systems. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy is very effective for suppressing power swing even under severe system conditions.

A simple model of inductor-coupled bistable oscillators is shown to exhibit pulse wave propagation. We demonstrate numerically that there exists a pulse wave which propagates with a constant speed in comparatively wide parameter region. In particular, the propagating pulse wave can be observed in non-uniform lattice with noise. The propagating pulse wave can be observed for comparatively strong coupling case, and for weak coupling case no propagating pulse wave can be observed (propagation failure). We also demonstrate various interaction phenomena between two pulses.

At high signal frequencies (i.e. in the GHz range), a connector must be considered as part of an electromagnetic transmission line. At these frequencies, the impedance characteristics of the connector stemming from the distributed inductance and capacitance of pins and the associated wiring, must be carefully controlled; insertion losses must be minimized and undesirable coupling between non-neighboring pins giving rise to crosstalk must be avoided to achieve optimal signal transmission. This paper reviews fundamental issues associated with the performance optimization of multi-conductor connector structures for high speed signal transmission. The paper complements an earlier publication that reviewed the major factors affecting electrical contact resistance at high frequencies [1].

In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems, the receiver must extract each transmitted signal from received signals. Iterative signal detection with belief propagation (BP) can improve the error rate performance, by increasing the number of detection and decoding iterations in MIMO systems. This number of iterations is, however, limited in actual systems because each additional iteration increases latency, receiver size, and so on. This paper proposes a convergence acceleration technique that can achieve better error rate performance with fewer iterations than the conventional iterative signal detection. Since the Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) of one bit propagates to all other bits with BP, improving some LLRs improves overall decoder performance. In our proposal, all the coded bits are divided into groups and only one group is detected in each iterative signal detection whereas in the conventional approach, each iterative signal detection run processes all coded bits, simultaneously. Our proposal increases the frequency of initial LLR update by increasing the number of iterative signal detections and decreasing the number of coded bits that the receiver detects in one iterative signal detection. Computer simulations show that our proposal achieves better error rate performance with fewer detection and decoding iterations than the conventional approach.

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) wireless systems offer both high data rates and high capacity. Since different signals are transmitted by different antennas simultaneously, interference occurs between the transmitted signals. Each receive antenna receives all the signals transmitted by each transmit antenna simultaneously. The receiver has to detect each signal from the multiplexed signal. A Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) algorithm is used for spatial filtering. MMSE filtering can realize low complexity signal detection, but the signal output by MMSE filtering suffers from interference by the other signals. MMSE-SIC combines MMSE filtering and Soft Interference Cancellation (SIC) with soft replicas and can achieve good Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. If an irregular LDPC code or a turbo code is used, the reliability and BER of the information bits output by the decoder are likely to be higher and better than the parity bits. In MMSE-SIC, bits with poor reliability lower the accuracy of soft replica estimation. When the soft replica is inaccurate, the gain obtained by SIC is small. M-ary Phase Shift Keying (PSK) and M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) also achieve high data rates. Larger constellations such as 8 PSK and 16 QAM transfer more bits per symbol, and the number of bits per symbol impacts the accuracy of SIC. Unfortunately, increasing the number of bits per symbol is likely to lower the accuracy of soft replica estimation. In this paper, we evaluate three mapping schemes for MMSE-SIC with an LDPC code and a turbo code with the goal of effectively increasing the SIC gain. The first scheme is information reliable mapping. In this scheme, information bits are assigned to strongly protected bits. In the second scheme, parity reliable mapping, parity bits are assigned to strongly protected bits. The last one is random mapping. Computer simulations show that in MMSE-SIC with an irregular LDPC code and a turbo code, information reliable mapping offers the highest SIC gain. We also show that in MMSE-SIC with the regular LDPC code, the gains offered by the mapping schemes are very small.

For the construction of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) systems using their unique properties, a PCF coupler (PCFC) is one of the key components of the systems. The characteristics of the PCFC depend on the state of air holes in the tapered region of the PCFC because the state of air holes in the tapered region affects light propagation in the PCFC taper. In this paper, coupling characteristics of PCFCs were theoretically investigated. In PCFCs with air hole remaining tapers, we found that a smaller elongation ratio i.e. a stronger elongation is required to obtain optical coupling as an air hole pitch or a ratio of air hole diameter to pitch is larger. In PCFCs with air hole collapsed tapers, it was clarified that a dependence of extinction ratio on air hole collapsed elongation ratio is higher for smaller elongation ratio. It was also clarified that an air hole remaining PCFC has slow wavelength characteristics in extinction ratio compared to an air hole collapsed PCFC. Air hole remaining PCFCs and air hole collapsed PCFCs were fabricated using a CO2 laser irradiation technique. We could successfully control whether air holes in the PCFC taper were remaining or collapsed by adjusting the irradiated laser power in the elongation process of the PCFC fabrication. It was experimentally clarified that the air hole remaining PCFC has slow wavelength characteristics in extinction ratio compared to the air hole collapsed PCFC. The tendencies of the measured wavelength characteristics of PCFCs agree with those of numerical results.

High-speed wireless communication systems have attracted much attention in recent years. To achieve a high-speed wireless communication system that utilizes an ultra-wide-frequency band, a broadband antenna is required. However, it is difficult to obtain an antenna that has uniform characteristics in a broad frequency band. Moreover, propagation characteristics are distorted in a multi-path environment. Thus, the communication quality tends to degrade due to the distortion in the frequency characteristics of the wideband communication system. This paper proposes a quasi-inverse filter (QIF) to improve the compensation effect for the transmitter antenna. Furthermore, we propose a method that employs the newly developed QIF that compensates for frequency characteristic distortion. We evaluate different configurations for the compensation system employing a pre-filter and post-filter in the wideband communication system. The effectiveness of the QIF in the case of severe distortion is verified by computer simulation. The proposed method is applied to a disc monopole antenna as a concrete example of a broadband antenna, and the compensation effect for the antenna is indicated.

The paper reviews recent advances in on-body antennas and propagation under a joint UK EPSRC research project between Queen Mary College, University of London and University of Birmingham. The study of on-body radio propagation has been extended by using various small antennas. The effect of antenna size, gain and radiation patterns on on-body channel characteristics has been studied. A practical wearable sensor antenna design is presented and it is demonstrated that a global simulation including sensor environment and human body is needed for accurate antenna characterisation. A 3D animation design software, POSER 6 has been used together with XFDTD to predict the on-body path loss variation due to changes in human postures and human motion. Finally, a preliminary study on the feasibility of a diversity scheme in an on-body environment has been carried out.

The visual inspection of defects in products is heavily dependent on human experience and instinct. In this situation, it is difficult to reduce the production costs and to shorten the inspection time and hence the total process time. Consequently people involved in this area desire an automatic inspection system. In this paper, we propose a hardware neural network, which is expected to provide high-speed operation for automatic inspection of products. Since neural networks can learn, this is a suitable method for self-adjustment of criteria for classification. To achieve high-speed operation, we use parallel and pipelining techniques. Furthermore, we use a piecewise linear function instead of a conventional activation function in order to save hardware resources. Consequently, our proposed hardware neural network achieved 6GCPS and 2GCUPS, which in our test sample proved to be sufficiently fast.

We propose a new stopping criterion for decoding LDPC codes which consists of a measure of decoder behaviors and a decision rule to predict decoding failure. We will show that the proposed measure, the number of satisfied check nodes, does not need (or minimizes) additional complexity, and the decision rule is efficient and more importantly channel independent, which was not possible in the previous work.

In this paper, the effects of Bragg scattering on ultra-wideband (UWB) signal transmission from periodic surfaces are reported. First, the frequency dispersive property of Bragg scattering is theoretically and experimentally confirmed. Next, the transfer function of both specular path and Bragg scattering are extracted. Then direct sequence UWB (DS-UWB) transmission simulations are conducted by using a raised cosine pulse that occupied 3.1 to 10.6 GHz and a Gaussian pulse that occupied 8.75 to 9.25 GHz. Finally, the effects of Bragg scattering on UWB systems are discussed.

In this paper, we present a clean and simple formulation of survey propagation (SP) for constraint-satisfaction problems as "probabilistic token passing". The result shows the importance of extending variable alphabets to their power sets in designing SP algorithms.

In a Cognitive Radio system, it is essential to recognize and avoid sources of interference signals. This paper describes a study on a location sensing scheme for interference signals, which utilizes multi-beam phased array antenna for cognitive wireless networks. This paper also elucidates its estimation accuracy of the interference location for the radio communication link using an OFDM signal such as WiMAX. Furthermore, we use the frequency spectrum of the received OFDM interference signal, to create a method that can estimate the propagation status. This spectrum can be monitored by using a software defined radio receiver.

This paper presents an ultra wideband (UWB) channel sounding scheme with a technique for estimating time of arrival (TOA) and angle of arrival (AOA) using measurement signals. Since the power spectrum over the UWB bandwidth can be measured in advance, we propose a signal model using the measurement power spectrum to design the proper UWB signals model. This signal model is more similar to measurement signals than the flat spectrum model which is an ideal model. If more than three waves impinge on a receiver, we must determine the proper grouping of the elements of TOA vector and AOA vector. It is difficult to determine the grouping using only measurement signals because of many degradation factors. We also propose pairing the elements of TOA vector and that of AOA vector using correlation method based on measurement signals and the proposed signal model. This technique is available for more than the case of three paths if pairing the estimated TOAs and AOAs of measurement signals is not accurately determined. We evaluated the proposed techniques for a vector network analyzer (VNA) with a three-dimensional virtual antenna array.