To improve the direction-of-arrival estimation performance of the small-aperture array, we propose a source localization method inspired by the Ormia fly’s coupled ears and MUSIC-like algorithm. The Ormia can local its host cricket’s sound precisely despite the tremendous incompatibility between the spacing of its ear and the sound wavelength. In this paper, we first implement a biologically inspired coupled system based on the coupled model of the Ormia’s ears and solve its responses by the modal decomposition method. Then, we analyze the effect of the system on the received signals of the array. Research shows that the system amplifies the amplitude ratio and phase difference between the signals, equivalent to creating a virtual array with a larger aperture. Finally, we apply the MUSIC-like algorithm for DOA estimation to suppress the colored noise caused by the system. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the localization precision and resolution of the array.

The fingerprint verification system is widely used in mobile devices because of fingerprint's distinctive features and ease of capture. Typically, mobile devices utilize small sensors, which have limited area, to capture fingerprint. Meanwhile, conventional fingerprint feature extraction methods need detailed fingerprint information, which is unsuitable for those small sensors. This paper proposes a novel fingerprint verification method for small area sensors based on deep learning. A systematic method combines deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) in a Siamese network for feature extraction and XGBoost for fingerprint similarity training. In addition, a padding technique also introduced to avoid wraparound error problem. Experimental results show that the method achieves an improved accuracy of 66.6% and 22.6% in the FingerPassDB7 and FVC2006DB1B dataset, respectively, compared to the existing methods.

To understand the radiation mechanism of an electrically small spherical helix antenna, we develop a theory on the radiation characteristics of the antenna. An analytical model of the antenna presuming a current on the wire to be sinusoidally distributed is proposed and analyzed with the spherical wave expansion. The radiation efficiency, radiation resistance, and radiation patterns are obtained in closed-form expression. The radiation efficiency evidently varies with the surface area of the wire and the radiation resistance depends on the square of the length of the wire. The obtained result for the radiation pattern illustrates the tilt of the pattern caused by the modes asymmetric to the z-axis. The radiation efficiency formula indicates a good agreement between the simulation and measurement result. In addition, the radiation resistance of the theoretical and simulation results exhibits good agreement. Considering the effect of the feeding structure of the fabricated antenna, the radiation resistance of the analytical model can be treated as a reasonable result. The result of radiation pattern also shows good agreement between the simulation and measurement results excluding a small contribution from the feeding cable acting as a scatterer.

This letter proposes a novel intelligent dynamic channel assignment (DCA) scheme with small-cells to improve the system performance for uplink machine-type communications (MTC) based on OFDMA-FDD. Outdoor MTC devices (OMDs) have serious interference from indoor MTC devices (IMDs) served by small-cell access points (SAPs) with frequency reuse. Thus, in the proposed DCA scheme, the macro base station (MBS) first measures the received signal strength from both OMDs and IMDs after setting the transmission power. Then, the MBS dynamically assigns subchannels to each SAP with consideration of strong interference from IMDs to the MBS. Through simulation results, it is shown that the proposed DCA scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of the capacity of OMDs and IMDs.

Currently, as the widespread usage of the smart devices in our daily life, the demands of high data rate and low latency services become important issues to facilitate various applications. However, high data rate service usually implies large bandwidth requirement. To solve the problem of bandwidth shortage below 6GHz (sub-6G), future wireless communications can be up-converted to the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) bands. Nevertheless, mm-wave frequency bands suffer from high channel attenuation and serious penetration loss compared with sub-6G frequency bands, and the signal transmission in the indoor environment will furthermore be affected by various partition materials, such as concrete, wood, glass, etc. Therefore, the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication system may use multiple small cells (SC) to overcome the signal attenuation caused by using mm-wave bands. This paper will analyze the attenuation characteristics of some common partition materials in indoor environments. Besides, the performances, such as the received signal power, signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and system capacity for different SC deployments are simulated and analyzed to provide the suitable guideline for each SC deployments.

In order to satisfy the user's demands for faster data rates and higher channel capacity, fifth generation (5G) wireless networks operate in the frequency at both sub-6GHz and millimeter wave bands for more abundant spectrum resources. Compared with the sub-6G bands, signals transmitted in the millimeter bands suffer from severe channel attenuation. A drone small cell (DSC) has been proposed recently to provide services outdoors. Not only does DSC have high maneuverability, it can also be deployed quickly in the required regions. Therefore, it is an important issue to establish the Air-to-Ground (ATG) channel model by taking into account the effects of building shielding and excess loss in various DSC deployments at different frequency bands. In this paper, we synthesize the ATG channels of the DSC and approximate the excess path loss of the ATG for different urban environments based on the ITU-R standard. With the approximated curve fitting relations, the proper height of the drone base station that satisfies a certain connected probability can be easily obtained for different scenarios.

We propose a new framework for estimating depth information from a single image. Our framework is relatively small and straightforward by employing a two-stage architecture: a residual network and a simple decoder network. Our residual network in this paper is a remodeled of the original ResNet-50 architecture, which consists of only thirty-eight convolution layers in the residual block following by pair of two up-sampling and layers. While the simple decoder network, stack of five convolution layers, accepts the initial depth to be refined as the final output depth. During training, we monitor the loss behavior and adjust the learning rate hyperparameter in order to improve the performance. Furthermore, instead of using a single common pixel-wise loss, we also compute loss based on gradient-direction, and their structure similarity. This setting in our network can significantly reduce the number of network parameters, and simultaneously get a more accurate image depth map. The performance of our approach has been evaluated by conducting both quantitative and qualitative comparisons with several prior related methods on the publicly NYU and KITTI datasets.

This paper reports our new communication components and downlink tests for realizing 2.65Gbps by utilizing two circular polarizations. We have developed an on-board X-band transmitter, an on-board dual circularly polarized-wave antenna, and a ground station. In the on-board transmitter, we optimized the bias conditions of GaN High Power Amplifier (HPA) to linearize AM-AM performance. We have also designed and fabricated a dual circularly polarized-wave antenna for low-crosstalk polarization multiplexing. The antenna is composed of a corrugated horn antenna and a septum-type polarizer. The antenna achieves Cross Polarization Discrimination (XPD) of 37-43dB in the target X-band. We also modify an existing 10m ground station antenna by replacing its primary radiator and adding a polarizer. We put the polarizer and Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) in a cryogenic chamber to reduce thermal noise. Total system noise temperature of the antenna is 58K (maximum) for 18K physical temperature when the angle of elevation is 90° on a fine winter day. The dual circularly polarized-wave ground station antenna has 39.0dB/K of Gain - system-noise Temperature ratio (G/T) and an XPD higher than 37dB. The downlinked signals are stored in a data recorder at the antenna site. Afterwards, we decoded the signals by using our non-real-time software demodulator. Our system has high frequency efficiency with a roll-off factor α=0.05 and polarization multiplexing of 64APSK. The communication bits per hertz corresponds to 8.41bit/Hz (2.65Gbit/315MHz). The system is demonstrated in orbit on board the RAPid Innovative payload demonstration Satellite (RAPIS-1). RAPIS-1 was launched from Uchinoura Space Center on January 19th, 2019. We decoded 1010 bits of downlinked R- and L-channel signals and found that the downlinked binary data was error free. Consequently, we have achieved 2.65Gbps communication speed in the X-band for earth observation satellites at 300 Mega symbols per second (Msps) and polarization multiplexing of 64APSK (coding rate: 4/5) for right- and left-hand circular polarizations.

A low frequency electric field probe that integrates data acquisition and storage is developed in this paper. An electric small monopole antenna printed on the circuit board is used as the receiving antenna; the rear end of the monopole antenna is connected to the integral circuit to achieve the flat frequency response; the logarithmic detection method is applied to obtain a high measurement dynamic range. In addition, a Microprogrammed Control Unit is set inside to realize data acquisition and storage. The size of the probe developed is not exceeding 20 mm × 20 mm × 30 mm. The field strength 0.2 V/m ~ 261 V/m can be measured in the frequency range of 500 Hz ~ 10 MHz, achieving a dynamic range over 62 dB. It is suitable for low frequency electric field strength measurement and shielding effectiveness test of small shield.

In small cell deployments, the combined usage of user association and inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) is inevitable. This paper investigates the joint optimization of user association and ICIC in the downlink. We first formulate the joint optimization problem as a utility maximization problem. We then employ the logarithmic utility function known as the proportional fair criteria. The optimum user association and the ICIC are derived by solving a convex optimization problem based on the average spectral efficiencies of all users. We propose an iterative algorithm to obtain the optimum solution to this problem. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm for the small cell deployments and shows that the proposed algorithm works well. We also compare the performance of the proposed algorithm based on utility maximization user association with the CRE, and show the superiority of the utility maximization. Furthermore, we show that intra-tier ICIC and inter-tier ICIC can effectively improve the throughput performance according to the conditions. It is also shown that the combined usage of inter-tier ICIC and intra-tier ICIC enhances the throughput performance compared to schemes employing either the inter- or intra-tier ICIC scheme.

Sequences that attain the smallest possible absolute sidelobes (SPASs) of periodic autocorrelation function (PACF) play fairly important roles in synchronization of communication systems, Large scale integrated circuit testing, and so on. This letter presents an approach to construct 16-QAM sequences of even periods, based on the known quaternary sequences. A relationship between the PACFs of 16-QAM and quaternary sequences is established, by which when quaternary sequences that attain the SPASs of PACF are employed, the proposed 16-QAM sequences have good PACF.

A monocone antenna is a type of monopole antenna with wideband characteristics. In this paper, a low-profile and small monocone antenna is proposed, by loading a circular plate and three oblique short elements. The characteristics of the proposed antenna are analyzed via simulation. Consequently, a low-profile and small monocone antenna can be obtained while maintaining the wideband characteristics. The relative bandwidth of the proposed antenna (voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) ≤ 2) is greater than 158.9%. The frequency band of digital terrestrial television broadcasting and the mobile communication systems (from 470 to 3600MHz) in Japan can be completely covered with VSWR ≤ 2. In addition, the radiation patterns of the proposed antenna are omni-directional. The proposed antenna is prototyped, and the validity of the simulation is verified through measurement.

This letter proposes a novel dynamic channel assignment (DCA) scheme to improve the downlink system capacity in heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with fractional frequency reuse (FFR). In the proposed DCA scheme, the macro base station (MBS) finds small-cell base stations (SBSs) that give strong interference to macro user equipments (MUEs) and then dynamically assigns subchannels to the SBSs to serve their small-cell user equipments (SUEs) according to the cross-tier interference information to MUEs. Through simulation results, it is shown that the proposed DCA scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of the total system capacity.

This paper evaluates the throughput of a distributed antenna network (DAN) with multiple mobile terminal scheduling and the usage of joint maximum-likelihood detection (MLD). Mobile terminals are closer to the desired antennas in the DAN which leads to higher throughput and better frequency utilization efficiency. However, when multiple mobile terminal scheduling is applied to the DAN, interference can occur between transmitted signals from antennas. Therefore, in this research, mobile terminal scheduling along with joint MLD is applied to reduce the effects of interference. A system level simulation shows that the usage of joint MLD in a densely packed DAN provides better system throughput regardless of the numbers of mobile terminals and fading channels.

Many applications, such as image signal processing, has an inherent tolerance for insignificant inaccuracies. Multiplication is a key arithmetic function for many applications. Approximate multipliers are considered an efficient technique to trade off energy relative to performance and accuracy for the error-tolerant applications. Here, we design and analyze four approximate multipliers that demonstrate lower power consumption and shorter critical path delay than the conventional multiplier. They employ an approximate tree compressor that halves the height of the partial product tree and generates a vector to compensate accuracy. Compared with the conventional Wallace tree multiplier, one of the evaluated 8-bit approximate multipliers reduces power consumption and critical path delay by 36.9% and 38.9%, respectively. With a 0.25% normalized mean error distance, the silicon area required to implement the multiplier is reduced by 50.3%. Our multipliers outperform the previously proposed approximate multipliers relative to power consumption, critical path delay, and design area. Results from two image processing applications also demonstrate that the qualities of the images processed by our multipliers are sufficiently accurate for such error-tolerant applications.

This paper proposes a novel dynamic channel assignment scheme named interference-aware dynamic channel assignment (IA-DCA) for the downlink of enterprise small-cell networks (ESNs) that employ orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and frequency division duplexing (FDD). In ESNs, a lot of small-cell access points (SAPs) are densely deployed in a building and thus small-cell user equipments (SUEs) have more serious co-tier interference from neighbor SAPs than the conventional small-cell network. Therefore, in the proposed IA-DCA scheme, a local gateway (LGW) dynamically assigns different numbers of subchannel groups to SUEs through their serving SAPs according to the given traffic load and interference information. Through simulation results, we show that the proposed IA-DCA scheme outperforms other dynamic channel assignment schemes based on graph coloring algorithm in terms of the mean SUE capacity, fairness, and mean SAP channel utilization.

This letter proposes a novel dynamic channel assignment (DCA) scheme with consideration of interference and fairness for the downlink of dense small-cell networks based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access-frequency division duplex. In the proposed scheme, a small-cell gateway fairly assigns subchannels to the small-cell user equipment (SUE) according to the co-tier interference from neighboring small-cell access points. From the simulation results, it is shown that the proposed DCA scheme outperforms other DCA schemes in terms of the fairness of each SUE capacity.

Smallcells have recently emerged as a potential approach for local area deployments that can satisfy high data rate requirements, reduce energy consumption and enhance network coverage. In this paper, we work on maximizing the weighted sum energy efficiency (WS-EE) for densely deployed smallcell networks. Due to the combinatorial and the general fractional program nature of the resource allocation problem, WS-EE maximization is non-convex and the optimal joint resource blocks (RBs) and power allocation is NP-hard. To solve this complex problem, we propose to decompose the primal problem into two subproblems (referred as RBs allocation and power control) and solve the subproblems sequentially. For the RBs allocation subproblem given any feasible network power profile, the optimal solution can be solved by maximizing throughput locally. For the power control subproblem, we propose to solve it locally based on a new defined pricing factor. Then, a distributed power control algorithm with guaranteed convergence is designed to achieve a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) point of the primal problem. Simulation results verify the performance improvement of our proposed resource allocation scheme in terms of WS-EE. Besides, the performance evaluation shows the tradeoff between the WS-EE and the sum rate of the smallcell networks.

In small-aperture high frequency surface wave radar, the main-lobe clutter all can be seen as a more severe space spread clutter under the influence of the smaller array aperture. It compromises the detection performance of moving vessels, especially when the target is submerged in the clutter. To tackle this issue, an improved spread clutter estimated canceller, combining spread clutter estimated canceller, adaptive selection strategy of the optimal training samples and rotating spatial beam method, is presented to suppress main-lobe clutter in both angle domain and range domain. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is shown to have far superior clutter suppression performance based on the real data.

Neighborhood preserving embedding is a widely used manifold reduced dimensionality technique. But NPE has to encounter two problems. One problem is that it suffers from the small-sample-size (SSS) problem. Another is that the performance of NPE is seriously sensitive to the neighborhood size k. To overcome the two problems, an exponential neighborhood preserving embedding (ENPE) is proposed in this paper. The main idea of ENPE is that the matrix exponential is introduced to NPE, then the SSS problem is avoided and low sensitivity to the neighborhood size k is gotten. The experiments are conducted on ORL, Georgia Tech and AR face database. The results show that, ENPE shows advantageous performance over other unsupervised methods, such as PCA, LPP, ELPP and NPE. Another is that ENPE is much less sensitive to the neighborhood parameter k contrasted with the unsupervised manifold learning methods LPP, ELPP and NPE.