In this paper, we consider a distributed power control scheme that can maximize overall capacity of an interference-limited wireless system in which the same radio resource is spatially reused among different transmitter-receiver pairs. This power control scheme employs a gradient-descent method in each transmitter, which adapts its own transmit power to co-channel interference dynamically to maximize the total weighted sum rate (WSR) of the system over a given interval. The key contribution in this paper is to propose a common feedback channel, over which a backward physical signal is accumulated for computing the gradient of the transmit power in each transmitter, thereby significantly reducing signaling overhead for the distributed power control. We show that the proposed power control scheme can achieve almost 95% of its theoretical upper WSR bound, while outperforming the non-power-controlled system by roughly 63% on average.

A one-shot system is a system that can be used only once during its life, and whose failures are detected only through inspections. In this paper, we discuss an inspection policy problem of one-shot system composed of multi-unit in series. Failed units are minimally repaired when failures are detected and all units in the system are replaced when the nth failure is detected after the last replacement. We derive the expected cost rate approximately. Our goal is to determine the optimal inspection policy that minimizes the expected cost rate.

Let v=p1m1p2m2…ptmt be the canonical prime factorization of v. In this paper, we give a construction of optimal ((s+1)×v,s+1,1) two-dimensional optical orthogonal codes with both at most one-pulse per wavelength and at most one-pulse per time slot, where s | gcd(p1-1,p2-1,...,pt-1). The method is much simpler than that in [1]. Optimal (m×v,k,1) two-dimensional optical orthogonal codes are also constructed based on the Steiner system S[2,k,m].

A connected-(r,s)-out-of-(m,n): F system is a kind of the connected-X-out-of-(m,n): F system defined by Boehme et al. [2]. A connected-(r,s)-out-of-(m,n): F system consists of m×n components arranged in (m,n)-matrix. This system fails if and only if there exists a grid of size r×s in which all components are failed. When m=r, this system can be regarded as a consecutive-s-out-of-n: F system, and then the optimal arrangement of this system satisfies theorem which stated by Malon [9] in the case of s=2. In this study, we proposed a new algorithm for obtaining optimal arrangement of the connected-(r,2)-out-of-(m,n): F system based on the above mentioned idea. We performed numerical experiments in order to compare the proposed algorithm with the algorithm of enumeration method, and calculated the order of the computation time of these two algorithms. The numerical experiments showed that the proposed algorithm was more efficiently than the algorithm of enumeration method.

Current software behavior models lack the ability to conduct semantic analysis. We propose a new model to detect abnormal behaviors based on a function semantic tree. First, a software behavior model in terms of state graph and software function is developed. Next, anomaly detection based on the model is conducted in two main steps: calculating deviation density of suspicious behaviors by comparison with state graph and detecting function sequence by function semantic rules. Deviation density can well detect control flow attacks by a deviation factor and a period division. In addition, with the help of semantic analysis, function semantic rules can accurately detect application layer attacks that fail in traditional approaches. Finally, a case study of RSS software illustrates how our approach works. Case study and a contrast experiment have shown that our model has strong expressivity and detection ability, which outperforms traditional behavior models.

In this paper we discuss the system failure probability of a k-out-of-n system considering common-cause failures. The conventional implicit technique is first introduced. Then the failure probabilities are formulated when the independence between common-cause failure events is assumed. We also provide algorithms to enumerate all the cut sets and the minimal cut sets, and to calculate the system failure probability. These methods are extendable to the case of systems with non-identical components. We verify the effectiveness of our method by comparison with the exact solution obtained by numerical calculation.

In this paper, synchronization for uncertain fractional order chaotic systems is investigated. By using the fractional order extension of the Lyapunov stability criterion, a linear feedback controller and an adaptive controller are designed for synchronizing uncertain fractional order chaotic systems without and with unknown external disturbance, respectively. Quadratic Lyapunov functions are used in the stability analysis of fractional-order systems, and fractional order adaptation law is constructed to update design parameter. The proposed methods can guarantee that the synchronization error converges to zero asymptotically. Finally, illustrative examples are given to confirm the theoretical results.

We present a power-saving method for large-scale storage systems of cloud data sharing services, particularly those providing media (video and photograph) sharing services. The idea behind our method is to periodically rearrange stored data in a disk array, so that the workload is skewed toward a small subset of disks, while other disks can be sent to standby mode. This idea is borrowed from the Popular Data Concentration (PDC) technique, but to avoid an increase in response time caused by the accesses to disks in standby mode, we introduce a function that predicts future access frequencies of the uploaded files. This function uses the correlation of potential future accesses with the combination of elapsed time after upload and the total number of accesses in the past. We obtain this function in statistical analysis of the real access patterns of 50,000 randomly selected publicly available photographs on Flickr over 7,000 hours (around 10 months). Moreover, to adapt to a constant massive influx of data, we propose a mechanism that effectively packs the continuously uploaded data into the disk array in a storage system based on the PDC. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we measured the performance in simulations and a prototype implementation. We observed that our method consumed 12.2% less energy than the static configuration (in which all disks are in active mode). At the same time, our method maintained a preferred response time, with 0.23% of the total accesses involving disks in standby mode.

Most research projects with respect to energy saving are trying to improve power efficiency and are using software to manage the power systems in the power on mode; but in our design, we modify the original Suspend to RAM mode-S3 state, which is the 3rd system state as defined by the ACPI specification, in order to reduce power consumption. We've redesigned the control circuit to save power while a PC is in the standby mode. First, we re-examine the entire circuit in the standby mode, and clarify which chip is used both to wake up the system and to turn off all unnecessary standby power previously used by the chips. Secondly, we redesign the power sequence and use an additional chip to control the system power supply, to allow a PC's normal system's operation to turn off the unnecessary power control chips. Third, in order to save power supply in the standby mode, we have simplified the multiple remote wake-up mechanism to control the remote boot device. The improvement shows that our design reduced power consumption to 0.21W from the original 0.56W while all the remote wake-up functions are disabled; and consumes 0.42W when using multiple remote wake-up functions. We implement the above modification from the legacy S3 state, and obtain lower power consumption. In order to distinguish the standby states, we name the modified S3 state as Deep S3 state.

This paper considers how to evaluate the resiliency for virtualized system with software rejuvenation. The software rejuvenation is a proactive technique to prevent the failure caused by aging phenomenon such as resource exhaustion. In particular, according to Gohsh et al. (2010), we compute a quantitative criterion to evaluate resiliency of system by using continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC). In addition, in order to convert general state-based models to CTMCs, we employ PH (phase-type) expansion technique. In numerical examples, we investigate the resiliency of virtualized system with software rejuvenation under two different rejuvenation policies.

Integral image is the sum of input image pixel values. It is mainly used to speed up the process of a box filter operation, such as Haar-like features. However, large memory capacity for integral image data can be an obstacle in an embedded environment with limited hardware. In a previous research, [5] reduced the size of integral image memory using 2×2 block structure with additional calculations. It can be easily extended to n×n block structure for further reduction, but it requires more additional calculations. In this paper, we propose a new block structure for the integral image by modifying the location of the reference pixel in the block. It results in much less additional calculations by reducing the number of memory accesses, while keeping the same amount of memory as the original block structure.

This letter deals with the consensus problem of multi-agent systems, which are composed of feedforward nonlinear systems under a directed network with a communication time delay. In order to solve this problem, a new consensus protocol with a low gain parameter is proposed. Moreover, it is shown that under some sufficient conditions, the proposed protocol can solve the consensus problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems even in the presence of an arbitrarily large communication delay. An illustrative example is presented to verify the validity of the proposed approach.

This paper presents a nonlinear model of human brain activity in response to visual stimuli according to Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) signals scanned by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). A BOLD signal often contains a low frequency signal component (trend), which is usually removed by detrending because it is considered a part of noise. However, such detrending could destroy the dynamics of the BOLD signal and ignore an essential component in the response. This paper shows a model that, in the absence of detrending, can predict the BOLD signal with smaller errors than existing models. The presented model also has low Schwarz information criterion, which implies that it will be less likely to overfit the experimental data. Comparison between the various types of artificial trends suggests that the trends are not merely the result of noise in the BOLD signal.

In cognitive radar systems (CRSs), target scattering coefficients (TSC) can be utilized to improve the performance of target identification and classification. This work considers the problem of TSC estimation for temporally correlated target. Multiple receive antennas are adopted to receive the echo waveforms, which are interfered by the signal-dependent clutter. Unlike existing estimation methods in time domain, a novel estimation method based on Kalman filtering (KF) is proposed in frequency domain to exploit the temporal TSC correlation, and reduce the complexity of subsequent waveform optimization. Additionally, to minimize the mean square error of estimated TSC at each KF iteration, in contrary to existing works, we directly model the design process as an optimization problem, which is non-convex and cannot be solved efficiently. Therefore, we propose a novel method, similar in some way to semi-definite programming (SDP), to convert the non-convex problem into a convex one. Simulation results demonstrate that the estimation performance can be significantly improved by the KF estimation with optimized waveform.

User context and user location in particular play an important role in location-based services (LBS). The location can be determined by various positioning methods. These are typically evaluated with average positioning error or percentile values, which are not the most suitable metrics for evaluation of how a positioning method functions in the semantic space. Therefore, we propose a new method for evaluation of positioning accuracy in the semantic space. We focus on two types of semantic user locations that are widely available in urban areas: the street address and the categories of the surrounding points of interest (POIs). We demonstrate its use on ten different positioning methods: a standalone satellite navigation device, GPS module on a smartphone, two versions of Foursquare positioning service, Google positioning service, a positioning service of the local mobile operator, and four other possible variants of mobile operator-based positioning methods. The evaluation suggests that approach with the street addresses is more promising approach due to either sparse or unevenly distributed POIs. Furthermore, some of the positioning methods that are less accurate in Euclidean space, such as a combination of the GPS data with the mobile operator-based method that relies on the propagation models, performed comparably well in the semantic space as the methods that are using more accurate technologies, such as Google and Foursquare.

The Earth's ionosphere can hinder radio propagation with two serious problems: group delay and phase advance. Ionospheric irregularities are significantly troublesome since they make the amplitude and phase of the radio signals fluctuate rapidly, which is known as ionospheric scintillation. Severe ionospheric scintillation could cause loss of phase lock, which would degrade the positioning accuracy and affect the performance of navigation systems. Based on the phase screen model, this paper presents a novel power spectrum model of phase scintillation and a model of amplitude scintillation. Preliminary results show that, when scintillation intensity increases, the random phase and amplitude fluctuations become stronger, coinciding with the observations. Simulations of the scintillation effects on the acquisition of Beidou signals predict acquisition probability. In addition, acquisition probabilities of GPS and Beidou signals under different scintillation intensities are presented. And by the same SNR the acquisition probability decreases when the scintillation intensity increases. The simulation result shows that scintillation could cause the loss of the acquisition performance of Beidou navigation system. According to the comparison of Beidou and GPS simulations, the code length and code rate of satellite signals have an effect on the acquisition performance of navigation system.

This paper investigates a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) combined with single user MIMO (SU-MIMO) for future LTE (Long-Term Evolution) enhancements. In particular, we propose practical schemes to efficiently combine NOMA with open-loop SU-MIMO (Transmission Mode 3: TM3) and closed-loop SU-MIMO (Transmission Mode 4: TM4) specified in LTE. The goal is also to clarify the performance gains of NOMA combined with SU-MIMO transmission, taking into account the LTE radio interface such as frequency-domain scheduling, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), and NOMA specific functionalities such as, multi-user pairing/ordering, transmit power allocation and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver side. Based on computer simulations, we evaluate NOMA link-level performance and show that the impact of error propagation associated with SIC is marginal when the power ratio of cell-edge and cell-center users is sufficiently large. In addition, we evaluate NOMA system-level performance gains for different granularities of scheduling and MCS (modulation and coding scheme) selection, for both genie-aided channel quality information (CQI) estimation and approximated CQI estimation, and using different number of power sets. Evaluation results show that NOMA combined with SU-MIMO can still provide a hefty portion of its expected gains even with approximated CQI estimation and limited number of power sets, and also when LTE compliant subband scheduling and wideband MCS is applied.

The Satellite/Terrestrial Integrated mobile Communication System (STICS), which allows terrestrial mobile phones to communicate directly through a satellite, has been studied [1]. Satellites are unaffected by the seismic activity that causes terrestrial damage, and therefore, the STICS can be expected to be a measure that ensures emergency call connection. This paper first describes the basic characteristics of call blocking rates of terrestrial mobile phone systems in areas where non-functional base stations are geographically clustered, as investigated through computer simulations that showed an increased call blocking rate as the number of non-functional base stations increased. Further simulations showed that restricting the use of the satellite system for emergency calls only ensures the STICS's capacity to transmit emergency communications; however, these simulations also revealed a weakness in the low channel utilization rate of the satellite system [2]. Therefore, in this paper, we propose increasing the channel utilization rate with a priority channel framework that divides the satellite channels between priority channels for emergency calls and non-priority channels that can be available for emergency or general use. Simulations of this priority channel framework showed that it increased the satellite system's channel utilization rate, while continuing to ensure emergency call connection [3]. These simulations showed that the STICS with a priority channel framework can provide efficient channel utilization and still be expected to provide a valuable secondary measure to ensure emergency communications in areas with clustered non-functional base stations during large-scale disasters.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) utilizing the power domain and advanced receiver has been considered as one promising multiple access technology for further cellular enhancements toward the 5th generation (5G) mobile communications system. Most of the existing investigations into NOMA focus on the combination of NOMA with orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) for either downlink or uplink. In this paper, we investigate NOMA for uplink with single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) being used. Differently from OFDMA, SC-FDMA requires consecutive resource allocation to a user equipment (UE) in order to achieve low peak to average power ratio (PAPR) transmission by the UE. Therefore, sophisticated designs of scheduling algorithm for NOMA with SC-FDMA are needed. To this end, this paper investigates the key issues of uplink NOMA scheduling such as UE grouping method and resource widening strategy. Because the optimal schemes have high computational complexity, novel schemes with low computational complexity are proposed for practical usage for uplink resource allocation of NOMA with SC-FDMA. On the basis of the proposed scheduling schemes, the performance of NOMA is investigated by system-level simulations in order to provide insights into the suitability of using NOMA for uplink radio access. Key issues impacting NOMA performance are evaluated and analyzed, such as scheduling granularity, UE number and the combination with fractional frequency reuse (FFR). Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and show that NOMA is a promising radio access technology for 5G systems.

In the case of a disaster such as an earthquake or a tsunami, the city, town, and village administration usually issues an evacuation advisory and other information through the Outdoor Public Address Speakers for the disaster reduction broadcasting system covering its area of jurisdiction. However, in areas those have previous experience of a disaster, people frequently voice the lack of audibility of the disaster reduction broadcast. In this research, we conducted a questionnaire survey on the residents in the central area of Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture, who are the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster, on the audible quality of outdoor public address (PA) speakers of the disaster reduction broadcasting system so as to understand the current state of such broadcasts and to propose ideal methods of sending and receiving information at the time of a future disaster.