This paper proposes a novel metamaterial structure, which equivalently indicates negative permittivity, for the purpose of applying it to a near-field imaging and/or diagnostics of electromagnetic properties by using a surface plasmon in microwave frequency range. The proposed structure consists of a conducting wire lattice with conducting spheres embedded at the mid-point of the wire. It is shown that a spatial dispersion of the wire lattice can be reduced significantly by the sphere. It is also shown that this structure can successfully be applied to an excitation of the surface plasmon in the microwave frequency range by adequately cutting into a thin slab.

The purpose of this study is to estimate the possible effect of cellular radio on implantable cardiac pacemakers in elevators. We previously investigated pacemaker EMI in elevator by examining the E-field distribution of horizontal plane at the height of expected for implanted pacemakers inside elevators. In this paper, we introduce our method for estimating EMI impact to implantable cardiac pacemakers using EMF distributions inside the region of the human body in which pacemakers are implanted. Simulations of a human phantom in an elevator are performed and histograms are derived from the resulting EMF distributions. The computed results of field strengths are compared with a certain reference level determined from experimentally obtained maximum interference distance of implantable cardiac pacemakers. This enables us to carry out a quantitative evaluation of the EMI impact to pacemakers by cellular radio transmission. This paper uses a numerical phantom model developed based on an European adult male. The simulations evaluate EMI on implantable cardiac pacemakers in three frequency bands. As a result, calculated E-field strengths are sufficiently low to cause the pacemaker to malfunction in the region examined.

A differential inter-symbol interference (ISI) cancellation method for time domain synchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) systems is proposed. The differential output of an OFDM system can greatly reduce the impact of ISI in the frequency domain and it constructs a convolutional structure, thus the Viterbi decoding algorithm can be used to recover the transmitted information from the output signal. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

As a candidate for the transmission technology of next generation mobile communication systems, time-domain spreading MC-CDMA systems have begun to attract much attention. In these systems, data and pilot symbols are spread in the time domain and code-multiplexed. To combat fading issues, we need to conduct channel estimation by using the code-multiplexed pilot symbols. Especially in next generation systems, frequency bands higher than those of current systems, which raise the maximum Doppler frequency, are expected to be used, so that a more powerful channel estimation method is expected. Considering this, we propose a channel estimation method for highly accurate channel estimation; it is a combination of a two-dimensional channel estimation method and an impulse response-based channel estimation method. We evaluate the proposed method by computer simulations.

With the rapid progress of electronic and information technology, an expectation for the realization of body area network (BAN) by means of ultra wide band (UWB) techniques has risen. Although the signal from a single UWB device is very low, the energy absorption may increase significantly when many UWB devices are simultaneously adorned to a human body. An analysis method is therefore required from the point of view of biological safety evaluation. In this study, two approaches, one is in the time domain and the other is in the frequency domain, are proposed for the specific energy absorption (SA) and the specific absorption rate (SAR) calculation. It is shown that the two approaches have the same accuracy but the time-domain approach is more straightforward in the numerical analysis. By using the time-domain approach, SA and SAR calculation results are given for multiple UWB pulse exposure to an anatomical human body model under the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) UWB limit.

To evaluate frequency-domain interference between orthogonally intersecting stripline geometries, a lumped mutual capacitance was incorporated into a circuit model, and then a simplified circuit was proposed in the previous paper. The circuit model was approximated from an investigation of the distribution of mutual capacitance but it has remained how the capacitance is approximated. In this paper, a technique using an error function is proposed for the problem. Then, the time-domain response in an analytical expression is studied using the simplified circuit model in a Laplace transformation to make the mechanism clear. Comparing the experimental and the computed results verifies the proposed models.

We design a unified multicarrier (UMC) system for wideband communication. The proposed scheme can provide an effective and unified method that can implement a wideband CDMA system with high spectrum efficiency and flexibility because of the free selection of system parameters and a double spreading in the time and frequency domains. Also, separation of the spectrums carrying the same data to further ensure the independent fading between subcarriers is performed, that is, subcarriers are interleaved in the frequency domain. This frequency interleaving mitigates the effect of ISI and ICI. We also theoretically analyze the performance of the UMC system by deriving the closed-form solution for probability of bit error in a frequency selective Rayleigh fading channel. The analysis has proved that the UMC system has outperformed the conventional single carrier CDMA system under given conditions.

For the purpose of reducing the quantization noise and power consumption of UWB-OFDM transceiver, a new time domain-based interpolator and decimator structure is proposed to realize five-bit D/A and A/D converters in the five-bit 128-tone sigma-delta modulation (SDM) UWB-OFDM transceiver. The five-bit 128-tone SDM UWB-OFDM transceiver using time domain-based interpolator and decimator in place of time spreader and de-spreader can obtain time-domain spread spectrum processing gain and reduce quantization noise simultaneously. The structure of the five-bit 128-tone SDM A/D converter, which employs 32 parallel analog SDM circuits without up-sampling, is designed. Simulation results demonstrate that BER of the proposed five-bit 128-tone SDM D/A and A/D converters based on time domain-based interpolator and decimator scheme can satisfy the performance requirements of the five-bit 128-tone SDM UWB-OFDM transceiver for the QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulations.

A new unified method is proposed to calculate the basic resonator parameters, i.e., the resonant frequency, external Q, unloaded Q and coupling coefficient in the time domain. By exciting the resonator from a weakly coupled external circuit, one can inject only a narrow resonant spectrum from the broad spectrum of the excitation pulse. The resonant frequency is easily counted by the number of zero crossings of the internal field intensity, whereas the Q's are calculated by the decay rate of the field amplitude. The coupling coefficient computed by the energy exchange rate between two resonators completes the new time domain algorithm.

A passive optical network (PON) that provides fiber to the home (FTTH) services is a fundamental access network topology in Japan. An optical fiber line monitoring and testing system is essential if we are to improve service reliability and reduce the maintenance costs of optical access networks. PONs have optical splitters in their optical fiber lines. It is difficult to find a fault in an optical fiber line equipped with an optical splitter by using a conventional optical fiber line testing system, which uses optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR) in a central office (CO), because Rayleigh backscattering from the branched fibers accumulates in the OTDR trace. This paper describes a newly developed optical fiber line testing method that employs bi-directional OTDRs with two wavelengths at branched fiber regions in a PON to locate a fault precisely. Optical fiber line testing is conducted by two OTDRs that are installed in a CO and on a customer's premises, respectively. The OTDR in the CO has a U-band maintenance wavelength. We present two kinds of maintenance wavelength allocation for OTDRs on a customer's premises, which are in the U-band and C-band respectively. An OTDR whose maintenance wavelength is in the U-band enables us to test in-service PON lines simply by filtering the U-band wavelength. For the maintenance wavelengths in the C-band, we can use a cost-effective conventional OTDR to test the PON from the customer's premises on condition that we clarify the peak pulse power limit and dynamic range. We describe the test procedures for both cases. We also clarify the insertion loss design for an optical filter in the CO when using the U-band to provide the maintenance wavelength and the criteria for in-service line testing when the using C-band to provide the maintenance wavelength. To confirm the feasibility of our approach, we demonstrate a bi-directional OTDR method using the U-band and the C-band, and the test procedure, which successfully detected fault locations in branched fiber regions. We also describe the use of packet loss measurements to investigate the effect of in-service line testing with an OTDR in the C-band on data communication quality.

Authors have been working in particle accelerator wake field analysis by using the Time Domain Boundary Element Method (TDBEM). A stable TDBEM scheme was presented and good agreements with conventional wake field analysis of the FDTD method were obtained. On the other hand, the TDBEM scheme still contains difficulty of initial value setting on interior region problems for infinitely long accelerator beam pipe. To avoid this initial value setting, we adopted a numerical model of beam pipes with finite length and wall thickness on open scattering problems. But the use of such finite beam pipe models causes another problem of unwanted scattering fields at the beam pipe edge, and leads to the involvement of interior resonant solutions. This paper presents a modified TDBEM scheme, Scattered-field Time Domain Boundary Element Method (S-TDBEM) to treat the infinitely long beam pipe on interior region problems. It is shown that the S-TDBEM is able to avoid the excitation of the edge scattering fields and the involvement of numerical instabilities caused by interior resonance, which occur in the conventional TDBEM.

In a typical OFDM system, a time domain equalizer (TEQ) can be used in order to reduce the channel length, allowing for shortening of the Cyclic Prefix (CP). In this paper, a novel TEQ method is proposed for OFDM systems, which can reduce implementation complexity without sacrificing performance. Furthermore, the length of the proposed TEQ may be arbitrary. For time-varying channels, an adaptive method is also developed to track the variation of the optimum TEQ coefficients rather than recomputing inversion of the channel matrix.

In order to improve the forward link capacity of cdma2000 HRPD (High Rate Packet Data) or CDMA2000 1xEV-DO, it is significant to overcome multi-path interference. This paper focuses on FDE (Frequency Domain Equalization) with MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error) criterion. On top of that, backward compatibility with HRPD should be maintained, in other words common channels such as the pilot channel should not be changed. Thus, the PN (Pseudo Noise) spread pilot block without CP (Cyclic Prefix) signals has to be dealt with for FDE. However, this will cause the conventional channel estimation accuracy to deteriorate. In order to improve the estimation accuracy of the conventional method, this paper presents a MRC (Maximal Ratio Combining) spectrum estimator, IPI (Inter-Path Interference) canceller, and path searcher. The results obtained from computer simulations reveal that the proposed method can improve the PER (Packet Error Rate) performance significantly. If compared with Rake combiner and TDE (Time Domain Equalization) with NLMS (Normalized Least Mean Square) scheme, the maximum data rates at a fixed PER of 1% can be increased by 5 to 8 times and 1.25 to 2.67 times, respectively.

A time domain (TD) speech enhancement technique to improve SNR in noise-contaminated speech is proposed. Additional supplementary scheme is applied to estimate the degree of noise of noisy speech. This is estimated from a function, which is previously prepared as the function of the parameter of the degree of noise. The function is obtained by least square (LS) method using the given degree of noise and the estimated parameter of the degree of noise. This parameter is obtained from the autocorrelation function (ACF) on frame-by-frame basis. This estimator almost accurately estimates the degree of noise and it is useful to reduce noise. The proposed method is based on two-stage processing. In the first stage, subtraction in time domain (STD), which is equivalent to ordinary spectral subtraction (SS), is carried out. In the result, the noise is reduced to a certain level. Further reduction of noise and by-product noise residual is carried out in the second stage, where blind source separation (BSS) technique is applied in time domain. Because the method is a single-channel speech enhancement, the other signal is generated by taking the noise characteristics into consideration in order to apply BSS. The generated signal plays a very important role in BSS. This paper presents an adaptive algorithm for separating sources in convolutive mixtures modeled by finite impulse response (FIR) filters. The coefficients of the FIR filter are estimated from the decorrelation of two mixtures. Here we are recovering only one signal of interest, in particular the voice of primary speaker free from interfering noises. In the experiment, the different levels of noise are added to the clean speech signal and the improvement of SNR at each stage is investigated. The noise types considered initially in this study consist of the synthesized white and color noise with SNR set from 0 to 30 dB. The proposed method is also tested with other real-world noises. The results show that the satisfactory SNR improvement is attained in the two-stage processing.

We present a novel approach for single-channel noise reduction of speech signals contaminated by additive noise. In this approach, the system requires speech samples to be uttered in advance by the same speaker as that of the input signal. Speech samples used in this method must have enough phonetic variety to reconstruct the input signal. In the proposed method, which we refer to as referential reconstruction, we have used a small database created from examples of speech, which will be called reference signals. Referential reconstruction uses an example-based approach, in which the objective is to find the candidate speech frame which is the most similar to the clean input frame without noise, although the input frame is contaminated with noise. When candidate frames are found, they become final outputs without any special processing. In order to find the candidate frames, a correlation coefficient is used as a similarity measure. Through automatic speech recognition experiments, the proposed method was shown to be effective, particularly for low-SNR speech signals corrupted with white noise or noise in high-frequency bands. Since the direct implementation of this method requires infeasible computational cost for searching through reference signals, a coarse-to-fine strategy is introduced in this paper.

Electromagnetic field probes inevitably disturb the original distribution of the field when they are positioned close to a device. This disturbance in turn affects measurement accuracy and device operation. We developed an optical magnetic field probe, comprising a loop antenna element and an electro-optic crystal, for highly accurate magnetic near-field measurement in the GHz frequency range. We analyzed the invasiveness of the optical magnetic field probe quantitatively both experimentally and using finite difference time domain simulation. We found that eliminating the metal cable reduced the disturbance of the surrounding field that was to be measured. In addition, we investigated the magnetic field detection characteristics of the probe and its influence on the operation of a microstrip line. The optical magnetic field probe was less invasive and provided more accurate measurement.

There have been significant advances in computational electromagnetics (CEM) in the last decade for a variety of antennas and propagation problems. Improvements in single frequency techniques including the finite element method (FEM), the fast mulitipole moment (FMM) method, and the method of moments (MoM) have led to significant simulation capabilities on basic computing platforms. Similar advances have occurred with time domain methods including finite difference time domain (FDTD) methods, time domain integral equation (TDIE) methods, and time domain finite element (TD-FEM) methods. Very complex radiating and scattering structures in the presence of complex materials have been modeled with many of these approaches. Many commercial products have been made available through the efforts of many individuals. The CEM simulators have enabled virtual EM test ranges that have led to dramatic improvements in our understanding of antennas and propagation in complex environments and to the realization of many of their important applications.

We have implemented a distributed sensor system based on an array of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), which can measure up to 1000 points with a single piece of fiber. The system consists of FBGs having the same resonant wavelengths and small reflectivities (0.1 dB), and a wavelength tunable optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR). To interrogate the distributed grating sensors and to address the event locations simultaneously, we have utilized the tunable OTDR. A thermoelectric temperature controller was used to tune the emission wavelength of the OTDR. The operating temperature of the laser diode was changed. By tuning the pulse wavelength of the OTDR, we could identify the FBGs whose resonant wavelengths were under change within the operating wavelength range of the DFB LD. A novel sensor cable with dry core structure and tensile cable was fabricated to realize significant construction savings at an industrial field and in-door and out-door applications. For experiments, a sensor cable having 52 gratings with 10 m separations was fabricated. To prevent confusion with unexpected signals from the front-panel connector zone of the OTDR, a 1 km buffer cable was installed in front of the OTDR. The proposed system could distinguish and locate the gratings that were under temperature variation from 20 to 70.

We developed a compact, 16-channel integrated optical subscriber module for one-fiber bi-directional optical access systems. They can support more subscribers in a limited mounting space. For ultimate compactness, we created 8-channel integrated super-compact optical modules, 4-channel integrated limiting amplifiers, and 4-channel integrated LD drivers for Fast Ethernet. We introduce a new simulation method to analyze the electrical crosstalk that degrades sensitivity of the optical module. A new IC architecture is applied to reduce electrical crosstalk. We manufactured the optical subscriber module with these optical modules and ICs. Experiments confirm that the module offers a sensitivity of -27.3 dBm under 16-channel 125 Mbit/s simultaneous operation.

A time-domain equalization (TEQ) algorithm is presented to shorten the effective channel impulse response to increase the transmission efficiency of the 54 Mbps IEEE 802.11a orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. In solving the linear equation Aw = B for the optimum TEQ coefficients, A is shown to be Hermitian and positive definite. The LDLT and LU decompositions are used to factorize A to reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results show high performance gains at a data rate of 54 Mbps with moderate orders of TEQ finite impulse response (FIR) filter. The design and implementation of the algorithm in field programmable gate array (FPGA) are also presented. The regularities among the elements of A are exploited to reduce hardware complexity. The LDLT and LU decompositions are combined in hardware design to find the TEQ coefficients in less than 4 µs. To compensate the effective channel impulse response, a radix-4 pipeline fast Fourier transform (FFT) is implemented in performing zero forcing equalization. The hardware implementation information is provided and simulation results are compared to mathematical values to verify the functionalities of the chips running at 54 Mbps.