This paper is aimed to present the design and feasibility investigations of adopting the available on-site optical inspection system, which is commonly used for steel plate dimension measurement, to supply on-line dynamic gap measurements of a non-contacting conveyance structure in a steel mill. Adequate software and hardware implementations based on digital image processing techniques have been adapted to the entire system formulations and estimations. Results show that the system can supply accurate and rapid gap measurements and thus can fulfill the design and operational objectives.

A new Hybrid-Carry-Selection (HCS) approach for deriving an efficient modulo 2n-1 addition is presented in this study. Its resulting adder architecture is simple and applicable for all n values. Based on 180-nm CMOS technology, the HCS-based modulo 2n-1 adder demonstrates its superiority in Area-Time (AT) performance over existing solutions.

We propose a new broadcast strategy for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with N transmit antennas at the transmitter and M≤N single antenna receivers. The proposed method, based on dirty-paper coding (DPC), spatially separates the M users but does not suffer from the power loss of classical spatial division multiple access (SDMA). For the special case of M=N=2 and when the two single antenna receivers are assumed to be co-located, the proposed scheme produces a 2 transmit, 2 receiver antenna MIMO transmission system that doubles the symbol rate of MIMO space-time block code (STBC) systems from one to two symbol per transmission time. It is proved theoretically and experimentally that the proposed scheme provides the same performance level as that of MIMO STBC systems (i.e., the Alamouti scheme) for the first symbol, and the same performance as the Bell labs layered space-time (BLAST) system for the second symbol. When compared to the BLAST system, the proposed scheme has the same symbol rate, but achieves significantly better performance, since it provides 2 level diversity per symbol on the first symbol while the BLAST system does not provide any diversity.

This paper discusses the behavior of the second-order modes (Hankel singular values) of linear continuous-time systems under variable transformations with positive-real functions. That is, given a transfer function H(s) and its second-order modes, we analyze the second-order modes of transformed systems H(F(s)), where 1/F(s) is an arbitrary positive-real function. We first discuss the case of lossless positive-real transformations, and show that the second-order modes are invariant under any lossless positive-real transformation. We next consider the case of general positive-real transformations, and reveal that the values of the second-order modes are decreased under any general positive-real transformation. We achieve the derivation of these results by describing the controllability/observability Gramians of transformed systems, with the help of the lossless positive-real lemma, the positive-real lemma, and state-space formulation of transformed systems.

Based on the concept of sliding mode control, this paper investigates the upper bound covariance assignment with H∞ norm and variance constrained problem for bilinear stochastic systems. We find that the invariance property of sliding mode control ensures nullity of the matched bilinear term in the system on the sliding mode. Moreover, using the upper bound covariance control approach and combining the sliding phase and hitting phase of the system design, we will derive the control feedback gain matrix G, which is essential to the controller u(t) design, to achieve the performance requirements. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the control effect of the proposed method.

By diversifying processor architecture, computer software is expected to be more resistant to plagiarism, analysis, and attacks. This study presents a new method to diversify instruction set architecture (ISA) by utilizing the redundancy in the instruction set. Our method is particularly suited for embedded systems implemented with FPGA technology, and realizes a genuine instruction set randomization, which has not been provided by the preceding studies. The evaluation results on four typical ISAs indicate that our scheme can provide a far larger degree of freedom than the preceding studies. Diversified processors based on MIPS architecture were actually implemented and evaluated with Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA. The increase of logic scale was modest: 5.1% in Specialized design and 3.6% in RAM-mapped design. The performance overhead was also modest: 3.4% in Specialized design and 11.6% in RAM-mapped design. From these results, our scheme is regarded as a practical and promising way to secure FPGA-based embedded systems.

The cognitive radio system consists of multiple wireless access systems that cover overlapping areas and cognitive terminals that use one or more of the wireless accesses simultaneously. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the cognitive radio system and the inter-system handover protocols. In the architecture, each cognitive terminal, which can access multiple radio systems, operates with a single local IP address. The control sequence and packet format are designed to achieve fast handover among the radio systems. Based on the architecture, we have developed a testbed system. On this system, we demonstrate that data can be delivered continuously and radio systems can be switched correctly without any packet loss. In addition, we present the result of the evaluation of the end-to-end latency on the testbed system. These testbed results demonstrate the system architecture described in the paper can achieve a cognitive radio system.

Cognitive Radios (CRs) are expected to perform more significant role in the view of efficient utilization of the spectrum resources in the future wireless communication networks. In this paper, a cognitive radio coexisting with cellular systems is proposed. In the case that a cellular system adopts Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) as a multiplexing scheme, the proposed CR terminals communicate in local area on uplink channels of the cellular system with transmission powers that don't interfere with base stations of the cellular system. Alternatively, in the case that a cellular system adopts Time Division Duplex (TDD), the CR terminals communicate on uplink slots of the cellular system. However if mobile terminals in the cellular system are near the CR network, uplink signals from the mobile terminals may interfere with the CR communications. In order to avoid interference from the mobile terminals, the CR terminal performs carrier sense during a beginning part of uplink slot, and only when the level of detected signal is below a threshold, then the CR terminal transmits a signal during the remained period of the uplink slot. In this paper, both the single carrier CR network that uses one frequency channel of the cellular system and the multicarrier CR network that uses multiple frequency channels of the cellular system are considered. The probabilities of successful CR communications, the average throughputs of the CR communications according to the positions of the CR network, and the interference levels from cognitive radio network to base stations of the cellular system are evaluated in the computer simulation then the effectiveness of the proposed network is clarified.

In this paper, an evolutionary approach is proposed to obtain a discrete-time state-space interval model for uncertain continuous-time systems having interval uncertainties. Based on a worst-case analysis, the problem to derive the discrete interval model is first formulated as multiple mono-objective optimization problems for matrix-value functions associated with the discrete system matrices, and subsequently optimized via a proposed genetic algorithm (GA) to obtain the lower and upper bounds of the entries in the system matrices. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, roots clustering of the characteristic equation of the obtained discrete interval model is illustrated for comparison with those obtained via existing methods.

In this letter, we provide a simple proof of bilinearity for the eta pairing. Based on it, we show an efficient method to compute the powered Tate pairing as well. Although efficiency of our method is equivalent to that of the Tate pairing on the eta pairing approach, but ours is more general in principle.

Based on the concept of sliding mode control, we study the problem of steady state covariance assignment for bilinear stochastic systems. We find that the invariance property of sliding mode control ensures nullity of the matched bilinear term in the system on the sliding mode. By suitably using Ito calculus, the controller u(t) can be designed to force the feedback gain matrix G to achieve the goal of steady state covariance assignment. We also compare our method with other approaches via simulations.

Most studies into multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems have aimed at determining the capacity-achieving (CA) input covariance given a certain degree of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and/or the receiver side. From the practical perspective, however, there is a growing interest in investigating the scenario where the system performance is power-limited as opposed to rate-limited. Of particular concern is the open problem of solving the optimal power-saving (PS) input covariance for spatially correlated MIMO channels when only the long-term (slow-varying) channel spatial covariance information is available at the transmitter. In an attempt to achieve this goal, this paper analyzes the characteristics of the optimal PS input covariance given the knowledge of channel spatial covariance information and the rate constraint of the transmission. Sufficient and necessary conditions of the optimal PS input covariance are derived. By considering the large-system regimes, we further devise an efficient iterative algorithm to compute the asymptotic optimal PS input covariance. Numerical results will show that the asymptotic solution is very effective in that it gives promising results even for MIMO systems with only a few antennas at the transmitter and the receiver.

The present paper describes an implementation of an intrusion detection system (IDS) on an FPGA for 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The system includes an exact string matching circuit for 1,225 Snort rules on a single device. A number of studies have examined string matching circuits for IDS. However, implementing a circuit that processes a large rule set at high throughput is difficult. In a previous study, we proposed a method for generating an NFA-based string matching circuit that has expandability of processing data width and drastically reduced resource requirements. In the present paper, we implement an IDS circuit that processes 1,225 Snort rules at 10 Gbps with a single Xilinx Virtex-II Pro xc2vp-100 using the NFA-based method. The proposed circuit also provides packet filtering for an intrusion protection system (IPS). In addition, we developed a tool for automatically generating the Verilog HDL source code of the IDS circuit from a Snort rule set. Using the FPGA and the IDS circuit generator, the proposed system is able to update the matching rules corresponding to new intrusions and attacks. We implemented the IDS circuit on an FPGA board and evaluated its accuracy and throughput. As a result, we confirmed in a test that the circuit detects attacks perfectly at the wire speed of 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Exploiting layer7 context is an effective approach to improving the accuracy of detecting malicious messages in network intrusion detection/prevention systems (NIDS/NIPSs). Layer7 context enables us to inspect message formats and the message exchanged order. Unfortunately, layer7-aware NIDS/NIPSs pose crucial implementation issues because they require full TCP and IP reassembly without losing 1) complete prevention, 2) performance, 3) application transparency, or 4) transport transparency. Complete prevention means that the NIDS/NIPS should prevent malicious messages from reaching target applications. Application transparency means not requiring any modifications to and/or reconfiguration of server and client applications. Transport transparency is not to disrupt the end-to-end semantics of TCP/IP. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing approaches meet all of these requirements. We have developed an efficient mechanism for layer7-aware NIDS/NIPSs that does meet the above requirements. Our store-through does this by forwarding each out-of-order or IP-fragmented packet immediately after copying the packet even if it has not been checked yet by an NIDS/NIPS sensor. Although the forwarded packet might turn out to be a part of an attack message, the store-through mechanism can successfully defend against the attack by blocking one of the subsequent packets that contain another part of attack message. Testing of a prototype in Linux kernel 2.4.30 demonstrated that the overhead of our mechanism is negligible compared with that of a simple IP forwarder even with the presence of out-of-order and IP-fragmented packets. In addition, the experimental results suggest that the CPU and memory usage incurred by our store-through is not significant.

The Ubiquitous sensor network (USN) node is required to operate for several months with limited system resources such as memory and power. The typical USN node is in the active state for less than 1% of its several month lifetime and waits in the inactive state for the remaining 99% of its lifetime. This paper suggests a power adjustment dual priority scheduler (PA-DPS) that offers low power consumption while meeting the USN requirements by estimating power consumption in the USN node. PA-DPS has been designed based on the event-driven approach and the dual-priority scheduling structure, which has been conventionally suggested in the real-time system field. From experimental results, PA-DPS reduced the inactive mode current up to 40% under the 1% duty cycle.

We consider power and rate adaptations in multicarrier (MC) direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) communications under the assumption that channel state information is provided at both the transmitter and the receiver. We propose, as a power allocation strategy in the frequency domain, to transmit each user's DS waveforms over the user's sub-band with the largest channel gain, rather than transmitting identical DS waveforms over all sub-bands. We then adopt channel inversion power adaptation in the time domain, where the target user's received power level maintains at a fixed value. We also investigate rate adaptation in the time domain, where the data rate is adapted such that a desired transmission quality is maintained. We analyze the BER performance of the proposed power and rate adaptations with fixed average transmission power, and show that power adaptation in both the frequency and the time domains or combined power adaptation in the frequency domain and rate adaptation in the time domain make significant performance improvement over the power adaptation in the frequency domain only. We also compare the performance of the proposed power and rate adaptation schemes in MC-DS/CDMA systems to that of power and rate adapted single carrier DS/CDMA systems with RAKE receiver.

This paper presents a study to estimate the composition of an electric load, i.e. to determine the amount of each load class by the direct measurements of the total electric current waveform from instrument reading. Kalman filter algorithm is applied to estimate the electric load composition on a consumer side of a distributed power system. The electric load supplied from the different voltage level by using a non-ideal delta-wye transformer is also studied with consideration of the practical environment for a distributed power system.

In 1995, Vanstone and Zuccherato proposed a novel method of generating RSA moduli having a predetermined set of bits which are the ASCII representation of user's identification information (i.e., name, email address, etc.). This could lead to a savings in bandwidth for data transmission and storage. In this paper, we apply this idea of Vanstone and Zuccherato for reducing the storage requirement of RSA public moduli to integer factoring based public-key schemes with their moduli of the form prq. More precisely, we explicitly propose two efficient methods for specifying high-order bits of prime factors of their public-keys. We also consider the security of the proposed methods.

We describe a way to write state machines inductively. The proposed method makes it possible to use the standard techniques for proving theorems on inductive types to verify that state machines satisfy invariant properties. A mutual exclusion protocol using a queue is used to exemplify the proposed method.

The objective of this paper is to analyze a pull type multi-product, multi-line and multi-stage flexible manufacturing system whose resources are subject to planned and unplanned breakdown conditions. To ensure a continual supply of the finished products, under breakdown conditions, parts/materials flow through alternate routes exhibiting routing flexibility. The machine resources are flexible in this study and are capable of producing more than one item. Every machining and assembly station has been equipped with automated inspection units to ensure the quality of the products. The system is modelled through coloured Petri net methodology and the impact of input factors have been shown on the performance of the system. The study has been extended to explore near-optimal conditions of the system using design of experiment and response surface methods.