Anomalous environmental electromagnetic (EM) radiation waves have been reported as the portents of earthquakes. Our study's goal is predicting earthquakes using EM radiation waves by detecting some anomalies. We have been measuring the Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) range EM radiation waves all over Japan. However, the recorded data contain signals unrelated to earthquakes. These signals, as noise, confound earthquake prediction efforts. In this paper, we propose an efficient method of global signal elimination and enhancement local signals using Independent Component Analysis (ICA). We evaluated the effectiveness of this method.

Gas or water leaks in pipes that are buried under ground or that are situated in the walls of buildings may occur due to aging or unpredictable accidents, such as earthquakes. Therefore, the detection of leaks in pipes is an important task and has been investigated extensively. In the present paper, we propose a novel leak detection method by means of acoustic wave. We inject an acoustic chirp signal into a target pipeline and then estimate the leak location from the delay time of the compressed pulse by passing the reflected signal through a correlator. In order to distinguish a leak reflection in a complicated pipeline arrangement, the reflection characteristics of leaks are carefully discussed by numerical simulations and experiments. There is a remarkable difference in the reflection characteristics between the leak and other types of discontinuity, and the property can be utilized to distinguish the leak reflection. The experimental results show that, even in a complicated pipe arrangement including bends and branches, the proposed approach can successfully implement the leak detection. Furthermore, the proposed approach has low cost and is easy to implement because only a personal computer and some commonly equipment are required.

Testing is a critical stage in integrated circuits production in order to guarantee reliability. The complexity and high integration level of mixed-signal ICs has put forward new challenges to circuit testing. This paper describes an oscillation-based combined self-test strategy for the analog portion and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) in integrated mixed-signal circuits. In test mode, the analog portion under test is reconfigured into an oscillator, generating periodic signals as the test stimulus of ADC. By analyzing the A/D conversion results, a histogram test of ADC can be performed, and the oscillation frequency as well as amplitude can be checked, and in this way the oscillation test of the analog portion is realized simultaneously. For an analog benchmark circuit combined with an ADC, triangle oscillation and sinusoid oscillation schemes are both given to test their faults. Experimental results show that fault coverage of the analog portion is 92.2% and 94.3% in the two schemes respectively, and faults in the ADC can also be tested.

An adaptive chirp beamforming method is proposed to solve the bias problem in the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of wideband chirp signals that have identical time-frequency parameters yet emanate from different directions. The proposed method, based on the steered minimum variance (STMV) method, exploits the time-frequency structure of a chirp signal to improve the DOA estimation performance by effectively suppressing the wideband chirp interferences causing the bias. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In a proxy multi-signature scheme, a designated proxy signer can generate the signature on behalf of a group of original signers. Recently, Wang and Cao proposed an identity based proxy multi-signature scheme along with a security model. Although they proved that their scheme is secure under this model, we disprove their claim and show that their scheme is not secure.

Recently, Duan and Cao proposed an multi-receiver identity-based signcryption scheme. They showed that their scheme is secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks in the random oracle model. In this paper, we show that their scheme is in fact not secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks under their defined security model.

The IEEE 1500 standard wrapper requires that its inputs and outputs be interfaced directly to the chip's primary inputs and outputs for controllability and observability. This is typically achieved by providing a dedicated Test Access Mechanism (TAM) between the wrapper and the primary inputs and outputs. However, when reusing the embedded Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnect instead of the dedicated TAM, the standard wrapper cannot be used as is because of the packet-based transfer mechanism and other functional requirements by the NoC. In this paper, we describe two NoC-compatible wrappers, which overcome these limitations of the 1500 wrapper. The wrappers (Type 1 and Type 2) complement each other to optimize NoC bandwidth utilization while minimizing the area overhead. The Type 2 wrapper uses larger area overhead to increase bandwidth efficiency, while Type 1 takes advantage of some special configurations which may not require a complex and high-cost wrapper. Two wrapper optimization algorithms are applied to both wrapper designs under channel-bandwidth and test-time constraints, resulting in very little or no increase in the test application time compared to conventional dedicated TAM approaches.

In this letter, we improve NF'07 (Nakanishi and Funabiki) VLR group signature scheme such that it satisfies exculpability and has lower computation costs. In the proposed scheme, a group member generates his own private key together with the group manager in order to realize exculpability while the signature size is not made longer. Also, a new revocation check method is proposed at the step of verifying, and the computation costs of verifying are independent of the number of the revoked members, while they are linear with the number of the revoked members in the original scheme. Thus, the proposed scheme is more efficient than the original scheme and can be applicable to mobile environments such as IEEE 802.1x.

A novel RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) refinement algorithm is proposed to enhance the resolution for indoor and outdoor real-time location tracking system. The proposed refinement algorithm is implemented in two separate phases. During the first phase, called the pre-processing step, RSSI values at different static locations are collected and processed to build a calibrated model for each reference node. Different measurement campaigns pertinent to each parameter in the model are implemented to analyze the sensitivity of RSSI. The propagation models constructed for each reference nodes are needed by the second phase. During the next phase, called the runtime process, real-time tracking is performed. Smoothing algorithm is proposed to minimize the dynamic fluctuation of radio signal received from each reference node when the mobile target is moving. Filtered RSSI values are converted to distances using formula calibrated in the first phase. Finally, an iterative trilateration algorithm is used for position estimation. Experiments relevant to the optimization algorithm are carried out in both indoor and outdoor environments and the results validated the feasibility of proposed algorithm in reducing the dynamic fluctuation for more accurate position estimation.

The moduli set (2n, 2n+1-1, 2n-1) which is free of (2n+1)-type modulus is profitable to construct a high-performance residue number system (RNS). In this paper, we derive a reduced-complexity residue-to-binary conversion algorithm for the moduli set (2n, 2n+1-1, 2n-1) by using New Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). The resulting converter architecture mainly consists of simple adder and multiplexer (MUX) which is suitable to realize an efficient VLSI implementation. For the various dynamic range (DR) requirements, the experimental results show that the proposed converter can significantly achieve at least 23.3% average Area-Time (AT) saving when comparing with the latest designs. Based on UMC 0.18 µm CMOS cell-based technology, the chip area for 16-bit residue-to-binary converter is 931931 µm2 and its working frequency is about 135 MHz including I/O pad.

The least-squares linear filtering and fixed-point smoothing problems of uncertainly observed signals are considered when the signal and the observation additive noise are correlated at any sampling time. Recursive algorithms, based on an innovation approach, are proposed without requiring the knowledge of the state-space model generating the signal, but only the autocovariance and crosscovariance functions of the signal and the observation white noise, as well as the probability that the signal exists in the observations.

The performance of recently developed Large Signal (LS) HBT model was evaluated with extensive LS measurements like Power spectrum, Load pull and Inter-modulation investigations. Proposed model has adopted temperature dependent leakage resistance and a simplified capacitance models. The model was implemented in ADS as SDD. Important feature of the model is that the main model parameters are taken directly from measurements in rather simple and understandable way. Results show good accuracy despite the simplicity of the model. To our knowledge the HBT model is one of a few HBT models which can handle high current & Power HBT devices, with significantly less model parameters with good accuracy.

The present paper introduces the construction of a class of sequence sets with zero-correlation zones called zero-correlation zone sequence sets. The proposed zero-correlation zone sequence set can be generated from an arbitrary perfect sequence and an arbitrary Golay complementary sequence pair. The proposed construction is a generalization of the zero-correlation zone sequence construction previously reported by the present author. The proposed sequence set can successfully provide CDMA communication without co-channel interference.

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 presents a new method for reconstruction of trigonometric polynomials, a specific class of bandlimited signals, from a number of integrated values of input signals. It is applied in signal reconstruction, spectral estimation, system identification, as well as in other important signal processing problems. The proposed method of processing can be used for precise rms measurements of periodic signal (or power and energy) based on the presented signal reconstruction. Based on the value of the integral of the original input (analogue) signal, with a known frequency spectrum but unknown amplitudes and phases, a reconstruction of its basic parameters is done by the means of derived analytical and summarized expressions. Subsequent calculation of all relevant indicators related to the monitoring and processing of ac voltage and current signals is provided in this manner. Computer simulation demonstrating the precision of these algorithms. We investigate the errors related to the signal reconstruction, and provide an error bound around the reconstructed time domain waveform.

We study in this paper the subchannel access and the rate assignment for the multicarrier multi-cell networks. For subchannel access, we show from theoretic results and simulation results that the scheme with only one user per cell in each subchannel outperforms the scheme with multiple users per cell in each subchannel. For rate assignment, a distributed rate assignment is proposed to assign the rate for all subchannels. The proposed rate assignment need not measure the channel gains and uses only local information to iteratively adjust the transmitting power and data rate. We prove that the aggregate rate can be increased by increasing the number of iterations in the proposed rate assignment.

This paper illustrates a feasible health informatics domain knowledge management process which helps gather useful technology information and reduce many knowledge misunderstandings among engineers who have participated in the IBM mainframe rightsizing project at National Taiwan University (NTU) Hospital. We design an asynchronously sharing mechanism to facilitate the knowledge transfer and our health informatics domain knowledge management process can be used to publish and retrieve documents dynamically. It effectively creates an acceptable discussion environment and even lessens the traditional meeting burden among development engineers. An overall description on the current software development status is presented. Then, the knowledge management implementation of health information systems is proposed.

In this paper, we investigate the proportional fair scheduling (PFS) problem for multiuser OFDM systems, considering the impact of packet length. Packet length influences scheduling schemes in a way that each scheduled packet should be ensured to be completely transmitted within the scheduled frames. We formulate the PFS problem as an optimization problem. Based on the observations on the structure of optimal solutions, we propose a heuristic scheduling algorithm that consists of two stages. First, subcarriers are allocated among users without considering the packet length constraint. Then on the second stage, subcarrier readjustment is done in a way that surplus subcarriers from length-satisfied users are released and allocated among length-unsatisfied users. The objective is to provide proportional fairness among users while guaranteeing complete transmission of each scheduled packet. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has quite close performance to the optimal scheme in terms of Multi-carrier Proportional Fairness Measure (MCPFM), throughput and average packet delay.

Two dual-band bandpass filters (BPFs) based on the doubly parallel-coupled stepped impedance resonators (SIRs) structures have been proposed in this paper. The coupled-SIRs with/without open-stub-loads are introduced in the filter design. The dual-band filters exhibiting multiple zeros design operate at 2.45/5.2-GHz for the WLAN applications. Two three-staged filters composed of four SIRs have been proposed with the tapped-line adapted in the I/O sections. A five-staged filter is constructed based on the same design principle to achieve a better band-rejection. The proposed filters have the advantages of a much wider bandwidth in both the passbands without sacrificing the passband's insertion loss and passband flatness. The design procedure for a conventional parallel-coupled microstrip lines model is still suitable to design the proposed filters. The proposed filters have achieved almost twice the bandwidth of a conventional parallel-coupled lines configuration under the same design parameters. The experiments have been conducted to verify filter performance. Measured results are in good agreement with the full-wave simulation results.

In this paper, a generalized Montgomery multiplication algorithm in GF(2m) using the Toeplitz matrix-vector representation is presented. The hardware architectures derived from this algorithm provide low-complexity bit-parallel systolic multipliers with trinomials and pentanomials. The results reveal that our proposed multipliers reduce the space complexity of approximately 15% compared with an existing systolic Montgomery multiplier for trinomials. Moreover, the proposed architectures have the features of regularity, modularity, and local interconnection. Accordingly, they are well suited to VLSI implementation.