To improve immunity against process gradients, a common centroid constraint, in which every pair of capacitors should be placed symmetrically with respect to a common center point, is widely used. The pair of capacitors are derived by dividing some original capacitors into two halves. Xiao et al. proposed a method to obtain a placement which satisfies the common centroid constraints, but this method has a defect. In this paper, we propose a decoding algorithm to obtain a placement which satisfies common centroid constraints.

In signal restoration problems, we expect to improve the restoration performance with a priori information about unknown target signals. In this paper, the parametric Wiener filter with linear constraints for unknown target signals is discussed. Since the parametric Wiener filter is usually defined as the minimizer of the criterion not for the unknown target signal but for the filter, it is difficult to impose constraints for the unknown target signal in the criterion. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a criterion for the parametric Wiener filter defined for the unknown target signal whose minimizer is equivalent to the solution obtained by the original formulation. On the basis of the newly obtained criterion, we derive a closed-form solution for the parametric Wiener filter with linear constraints.

This paper proposes an improved color barycenter model (CBM) and its separation for automatic road sign (RS) detection. The previous version of CBM can find out the colors of RS, but the accuracy is not high enough for separating the magenta and blue regions and the influence of number with the same color are not considered. In this paper, the improved CBM expands the barycenter distribution to cylindrical coordinate system (CCS) and takes the number of colors at each position into account for clustering. Under this distribution, the color information can be represented more clearly for analyzing. Then aim to the characteristic of barycenter distribution in CBM (CBM-BD), a constrained clustering method is presented to cluster the CBM-BD in CCS. Although the proposed clustering method looks like conventional K-means in some part, it can solve some limitations of K-means in our research. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to detect RS with high robustness.

Conventional CPM signals employ information sequence with time-unlimited phase shaping pulse (PSP) to achieve power and bandwidth efficient transmission. On the contrary, information sequence using time-limited PSP was believed to produce power-wasting data-independent discrete spectral lines in CPM spectra, and was suggested to be avoided. In this paper, we revisit this problem and adopt the time-limited PSP to replace the one with time-unlimited, it turns out to have an alternative solution to the CPM scheme. We first modify the spectral computing formula for the CPM with time-limited PSP (or CPM-TL) from conventional CPM formula and show that the discrete spectral lines appeared in the power density spectrum of CPM-TL signals can be diminished or become negligible by appropriately choosing PSP. We also show that this class of CPM can use any real number modulation index (h) and the resultant trellis structure of CPM guarantees the maximum constraint length allowed by the number of states in the MLSD receiver. Finally, the energy-bandwidth performance of CPM using time-limited PSP is investigated and compared with conventional CPM with time-unlimited PSP. From numerical results we show that, under the same number of states in the MLSD receiver and bandwidth occupancy, this subclass of CPM could outperform the conventional CPM up to 6dB coding gain, for h<1, in many cases.

The reliability of a connector depends on the contact force generated by the spring in the terminal of a connector. The springs are commonly formed by stamping from a strip of spring material. Therefore, the prediction of the force — displacement relation by the finite element (FE) method is very important for the design of terminals. For simulation, an accurate model of stress-strain (s-s) responses of the materials is required. When the materials are deformed in the forward and then the reverse directions, almost all spring materials show different s-s responses between the two directions, due to the Bauschinger effect. This phenomenon makes simulation difficult because the s-s response depends on the prior deformation of the material. Hence, the measurement of the s-s response is the elementary process, by cyclic tension and compression testing in which materials deform elastically and plastically. Then, the s-s responses should be described accurately by mathematical models for FE simulation. In this paper, the authors compare the experimental s-s responses of copper-based materials with conventional mathematical models and the Yoshida-Uemori model, which is a constitutive model having high capability of describing the elastic and plastic behavior of cyclic deformation. The calculated s-s responses only by Yoshida-Uemori model were in very good agreement with the corresponding experimental results. Therefore, the use of this model for FE simulation would be recommended for a more accurate prediction of force-displacement relation of the spring.

In modern automobiles, Controller Area Network (CAN) has been widely used in different sub systems that are connected by using gateway. While a gateway is necessary to integrate different electronic sub systems, it brings challenges for the analysis of Worst Case Response Time (WCRT) for CAN messages, which is critical from the safety point of view. In this paper, we first analyzed the challenges for WCRT analysis of messages in gateway-interconnected CANs. Then, based on the existing WCRT analysis method proposed for one single CAN, a new WCRT analysis method that uses two new definitions to analyze the interfering delay of sporadically arriving gateway messages is proposed for non-gateway messages. Furthermore, a division approach, where the end-to-end WCRT analysis of gateway messages is transformed into the similar situation with that of non-gateway messages, is adopted for gateway messages. Finally, the proposed method is extended to include CANs with different bandwidths. The proposed method is proved to be safe, and experimental results demonstrated its effectiveness by comparing it with a full space searching based simulator and applying it to a real message set.

Wireless sensor nodes are becoming more and more common in various settings and require a long battery life for better maintainability. Since most sensor nodes are powered by batteries, energy efficiency is a critical problem. In an experiment, we observed that when peak power consumption is high, battery voltage drops quickly, and the sensor stops working even though some useful charge remains in the battery. We propose three off-line algorithms that extend battery life by scheduling sensors' execution time that is able to reduce peak power consumption as much as possible under a deadline constraint. We also developed a simulator to evaluate the effectiveness of these algorithms. The simulation results showed that one of the three algorithms dramatically can extend battery life approximately three time as long as in simultaneous sensor activation.

A smart meter, a component of smart grid systems, has low computational capability. This is in contrast to data collection units (DCUs) and meter data management servers (MDMSs). In this study, we propose a lightweight signature scheme and an authentication and report protocol that can reduce computational overhead and facilitate efficient operation of these three components in smart grid systems. The proposed signature scheme, called the linear map digital signature scheme (LMDSS), uses properties of linear maps and matrix operations; hence, it has low computational requirements. The proposed protocol is a delegation-based authentication protocol that uses an intermediate node, DCU. Using the proposed protocol, authentication of a DCU can be completed by a hash function. To evaluate the performance of the scheme and protocol, we implemented signature schemes, ours and others, and simulated the proposed protocol to obtain analytical results. We also proved that the scheme is secure by using a random oracle and analyzing the security of the protocol based on possible attack scenarios.

MIMO two-way multi-hop networks are considered in which the radio resource is fully reused in all multi-hop links to increase spectrum efficiency while the adjacent interference signals are cancelled by MIMO processing. In addition, the nodes in the multi-hop network optimize their transmit powers to mitigate the remaining overreach interference. Our main contribution in this paper is to investigate an efficient relay placement method with power allocation in such networks. We present two formulations, namely QoS-constrained optimization and SINR balancing, and solve them using a sequential geometric programming method. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of convex optimization to find an efficient configuration. Simulation results show that relay placement has an important impact on the effectiveness of power allocation to mitigate the interference. Particularly, we found that an uniform relay location is optimal only in power-limited scenarios. With optimal relay locations, significant end-to-end rate gain and power consumption reduction are achieved by SINR balancing and QoS-constrained optimization, respectively. Furthermore, the optimal number of hops is investigated in power or interference-limited scenarios.

Given a tree T with edge lengths and edge weights, and a value B, the length-constrained heaviest path problem is to find a path in T with maximum path weight whose path length is at most B. We present a linear time algorithm for the problem when the edge lengths are uniform, i.e., all one. This algorithm with slight modification can be used to find the heaviest path of length exactly B in T in linear time.

Dual-vdd has been proposed to optimize the power of circuits without violating the performance. In this paper, different from traditional methods which focus on making full use of slacks of non-critical gates, an efficient min-cut based voltage assignment algorithm concentrating on critical gates is proposed. And then this algorithm is integrated into a searching engine to auto-select rational voltages for dual-vdd system. Experimental results show that our search engine can always achieve good pair of dual-vdd, and our min-cut based algorithm outperformed previous works for voltage assignment both on power consumption and runtime.

A wideband beamformer with mainlobe control is proposed. To make the beamformer robust against pointing errors, inequality rather than equality constraints are used to restrict the mainlobe response, thus more degrees of freedom are saved. The constraints involved are nonconvex, therefore are linearly approximated so that the beamformer can be obtained by iterating a second-order cone program. Moreover, the response variance element is introduced to achieve a frequency invariant beamwidth. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by numerical examples.

In this letter a general admission control strategy is proposed and mathematically analyzed. Fractional buffering finely adjusts different QoS metrics allowing them to simultaneously achieve their maximum acceptable values, maximizing system capacity. Fractional buffering also allows the adequate and fair performance comparison among different resource management strategies and/or evaluation scenarios.

This letter presents a robust receiver using the generalized sidelobe canceller aided with the high-order derivative constraint technique for multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) uplink against carrier frequency offset (CFO). Numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed receiver.

This letter discusses the applicability of boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving to pairwise testing in practice. Due to its recent rapid advance, using SAT solving seems a promising approach for search-based testing and indeed has already been practiced in test generation for pairwise testing. The previous approaches use SAT solving either for finding a small test set in the absence of parameter constraints or handling constraints, but not for both. This letter proposes an approach that uses a SAT solver for constructing a test set for pairwise testing in the presence of parameter constraints. This allows us to make full use of SAT solving for pairwise testing in practice.

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is widely used for music transcription because of its efficiency. However, the conventional NMF-based music transcription algorithm often causes harmonic confusion errors or time split-up errors, because the NMF decomposes the time-frequency data according to the activated frequency in its time. To solve these problems, we proposed an NMF with temporal continuity and harmonicity constraints. The temporal continuity constraint prevented the time split-up of the continuous time components, and the harmonicity constraint helped to bind the fundamental with harmonic frequencies by reducing the additional octave errors. The transcription performance of the proposed algorithm was compared with that of the conventional algorithms, which showed that the proposed method helped to reduce additional false errors and increased the overall transcription performance.

Template matching for image sequences captured with a moving camera is very important for several applications such as Robot Vision, SLAM, ITS, and video surveillance systems. However, it is difficult to realize accurate template matching using only visual feature information such as HSV histograms, edge histograms, HOG histograms, and SIFT features, because it is affected by several phenomena such as illumination change, viewpoint change, size change, and noise. In order to realize robust tracking, structure information such as the relative position of each part of the object should be considered. In this paper, we propose a method that considers both visual feature information and structure information. Experiments show that the proposed method realizes robust tracking and determine the relationships between object parts in the scenes and those in the template.

In a large software system development project, many documents are prepared and updated frequently. In such a situation, support is needed for looking through these documents easily to identify inconsistencies and to maintain traceability. In this research, we focus on the requirements documents such as use cases and consider how to create models from the use case descriptions in unformatted text. In the model construction, we propose a few semantic constraints based on the features of the use cases and use them for a predicate argument structure analysis to assign semantic labels to actors and actions. With this approach, we show that we can assign semantic labels without enhancing any existing general lexical resources such as case frame dictionaries and design a less language-dependent model construction architecture. By using the constructed model, we consider a system for quality analysis of the use cases and automated test case generation to keep the traceability between document sets. We evaluated the reuse of the existing use cases and generated test case steps automatically with the proposed prototype system from real-world use cases in the development of a system using a packaged application. Based on the evaluation, we show how to construct models with high precision from English and Japanese use case data. Also, we could generate good test cases for about 90% of the real use cases through the manual improvement of the descriptions based on the feedback from the quality analysis system.

We present a new framework of the data-reusing (DR) adaptive algorithms by incorporating a constraint on noise, referred to as a noise constraint. The motivation behind this work is that the use of the statistical knowledge of the channel noise can contribute toward improving the convergence performance of an adaptive filter in identifying a noisy linear finite impulse response (FIR) channel. By incorporating the noise constraint into the cost function of the DR adaptive algorithms, the noise constrained DR (NC-DR) adaptive algorithms are derived. Experimental results clearly indicate their superior performance over the conventional DR ones.

In this letter, we address the performance analysis of underlay selective decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks in Rayleigh fading channels with non-necessarily identical fading parameters. In particular, a novel result on the outage probability of the considered system is presented. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to verify the correctness of our exact closed-form expression. Our proposed analysis can be adopted for various underlay spectrum sharing applications of cognitive DF relay networks.