We propose a new Multimedia-on-Demand (MoD) system which provides broadcast, batch and interactive services concurrently. An analytical model is derived for the performance evaluation of this MoD system. Numerical results show that with proper design the system can provide better system performance than some previously proposed MoD systems.

In this study, a novel binary image authentication scheme is proposed, which can be used to detect any alteration of the host image. In the proposed scheme, the watermark is embedded into a host image using a Hamming-code-based embedding algorithm. A performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves both smaller distortion and lower false negative rates than the previous schemes.

In this paper, we employ time-reversal space-time block coding (TR-STBC) in single-carrier direct sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) block transmission in the presence of multiple access interference (MAI) as well as intersymbol interference (ISI), which is subject to fairly long delay spread. We introduce the transmission rate improvement by capitalizing on the assignment of additional spreading codes to each user so as to expand the cardinality of space-time code matrix with no sacrifice of diversity order. Given perfect channel state information at the receiver, a simple linear frequency-domain interference suppression scheme on a basis of symbol-by-symbol processing is developed under certain circumstances. A "turbo principle" receiver is facilitated by exploiting the serially concatenated structure at the transmitter to further enhance system performance. Simulation results justify the efficacy of our proposed system and also present performance comparisons with some existing systems in terms of bit error rate (BER).

The recent progress in sensor and wireless communication technologies has enabled the design and implementation of new applications such as sensor telemetry which is the use of wireless sensors to gather fine-grained information from products, people and places. In this work, we consider a realistic telemetry application in which an area is periodically monitored by a sensor network which gathers data from equally spaced sample points. The objective is to maximize the lifetime of the network by jointly selecting the sensing nodes, the node transmission powers and the route to the base station from each sensing node. We develop an optimization-based algorithm OPT-RE and a low complexity algorithm SP-RE for this purpose and analyze their dynamics through extensive numerical studies. Our results indicate that SP-RE is a promising algorithm which has comparable performance to that of the more computationally intensive OPT-RE algorithm. The energy consumption is significantly affected by the channel access method, and in this paper, we also compare the effects of the collision free TDMA and contention based CSMA/CA methods. We propose practical enhancements to CSMA/CA so that the energy consumption due to collisions is reduced. Our simulation results indicate that with the proposed enhancements contention based channel access can provide comparable performance to that of the collision free methods.

The power reduction of display devices has become an important issue for extending battery life and running time when they are used in digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) mobile phones. DMB mobile phones generally use 16-bit data per pixel to reduce power consumption even though a liquid crystal display (LCD) graphic controller can support 16-, 18-, and 24-bit data per pixel. Also, the total transmission time of 16-bit data per pixel is only half that for 18- and 24-bit data per pixel. Decoded 24-bit image data in the frame memory of a DMB decoder are asymmetrically truncated to 16-bit image data. This results in a lack of smoothness such as blocking effects and/or pseudo edge artifacts. To solve these problems, the author proposes and implements a new asymmetric pixel data truncation error compensation algorithm using 1-bit least significant bit (LSB) data expansion with correlated color information for the purpose of ensuring smoothness. In the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is able to correct various artifacts.

We review practical case studies of a developing method of highly reliable real-time embedded control systems using a CPU model-based hardware/software co-simulation. We take an approach that enables us to fully simulate a virtual mechanical control system including a mechatronics plant, microcontroller hardware, and object code level software. This full virtual system approach simulates control system behavior, especially that of the microcontroller hardware and software. It enables design space exploration of microarchitecture, control design validation, robustness evaluation of the system, software optimization before components design. It also avoids potential problems. The advantage of this work is that it comprises all the components in a typical control system, enabling the designers to analyze effects from different domains, for example mechanical analysis of behavior due to differences in controller microarchitecture. To further improve system design, evaluation and analysis, we implemented an integrated behavior analyzer in the development environment. This analyzer can graphically display the processor behavior during the simulation without affecting simulation results such as task level CPU load, interrupt statistics, and the software variable transition chart. It also provides useful information on the system behavior. This virtual system analysis does not require software modification, does not change the control timing, and does not require any processing power from the target microcontroller. Therefore this method is suitable for real-time embedded control system design, in particular automotive control system design that requires a high level of reliability, robustness, quality, and safety. In this study, a Renesas SH-2A microcontroller model was developed on a CoMETTMplatform from VaST Systems Technology. An electronic throttle control (ETC) system and an engine control system were chosen to prove this concept. The electronic throttle body (ETB) model on the Saber® simulator from Synopsys® and the engine model on MATLAB®/Simulink® simulator from MathWorks can be simulated with the SH-2A model using a newly developed co-simulation interface between MATLAB®/Simulink® and CoMETTM. Though the SH-2A chip was being developed as the project was being executed, we were able to complete the OSEK OS development, control software design, and verification of the entire system using the virtual environment. After releasing a working sample chip in a later stage of the project, we found that such software could run on both actual ETC system and engine control system without critical problem. This demonstrates that our models and simulation environment are sufficiently credible and trustworthy.

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.

We propose in this paper a SOM-like algorithm that accepts online, as inputs, starts and ends of viewing of a multimedia content by many users; a one-dimensional map is then self-organized, providing an approximation of density distribution showing how many users see a part of a multimedia content. In this way "viewing behavior of crowds" information is accumulated as experience accumulates, summarized into one SOM-like network as knowledge is extracted, and is presented to new users as the knowledge is transmitted. Accumulation of multimedia contents on the Internet increases the need for time-efficient viewing of the contents and the possibility of compiling information on many users' viewing experiences. In the circumstances, a system has been proposed that presents, in the Internet environment, a kind of summary of viewing records of many viewers of a multimedia content. The summary is expected to show that some part is seen by many users but some part is rarely seen. The function is similar to websites utilizing "wisdom of crowds" and is facilitated by our proposed algorithm.

This paper presents interference suppression using a subband adaptive array (SBAA) for uplink space-time block coding (STBC) code division multiple access (CDMA) under a frequency selective fading (FSF) channel. The proposed scheme utilizes CDMA with STBC and a receive array antenna with SBAA processing at the receiver. The received signal is converted into the frequency domain before despreading and adaptive processing is performed for each subband. A novel SBAA construction is introduced to process CDMA signals based on STBC. To improve the performance of the proposed scheme, we evaluate STBC-SBAA using spreading codes cyclic prefix (CP). Simulation results demonstrate an improved performance of the proposed system for single and multiuser environments compared to competing related techniques.

A 128128 pixel functional image sensor was implemented. The sensor was able to capture images at 1,000 frame/s and extract the sizes and positions of 10 objects/frame when clocked at 8 MHz. The size of each pixel was 18 µm18 µm and the fill factor was 28%. The chip, 3.24 mm3.48 mm in size, was implemented with a 0.35 µm CMOS sensor process; the power consumption was 29.7 mW at 8 MHz.

In this paper, we propose a PON-based access network based on conventional TDM-PON architecture for the smooth, economical and effective transition to the future optical access network. We also propose a dynamic MAC protocol for wavelength channel and bandwidth allocation in the TDM-PON subscriber networks, which can provide enhanced network scalability and flexibility, and greater adaptability to the increasing number of subscribers in TDM-PON. In the proposed dynamic MAC protocol, several key functions are manifested, such as multiple wavelength channel utilization and dynamic allocation of multiple time-slots to a user depending on SLA between OLT and ONUs to meet QoS requirements. A dedicated control channel is used for delivering the request and status information between OLT and ONUs. We evaluate the performances of the proposed MAC protocol thru a statistical queuing analysis and numerical simulations. In addition, through simulations using various traffic models we verify the superior performance of the proposed approach by comparing it with conventional TDM-PONs.

As a fundamental building block of multirate systems, the downsampler, also known as the decimator, is a periodically time-varying linear system. An eigensignal of the downsampler is defined to be an input signal which appears at the output unaltered or scaled by a non-zero coefficient. In this paper, the eigensignals are studied and characterized in the time and z domains. The time-domain characterization is carried out using number theoretic principles, while the one-sided z-transform and Lambert-form series are used for the transform-domain characterization. Examples of non-trivial eigensignals are provided. These include the special classes of multiplicative and completely multiplicative eigensignals. Moreover, the locus of poles of eigensignals with rational z transforms are identified.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems for mobile applications suffer from inter-carrier-interference (ICI) due to frequency offset and to time-variation of the channels and from high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR). In this paper, we revisit symmetric cancellation coding (SCC) proposed by Sathananthan et al. and compare the effectiveness of SCC with a fixed subtraction combining and the well-known polynomial cancellation coding (PCC) over Rayleigh fading channels with Doppler spread in terms of the signal-to-interference plus noise power ratio (SINR) and bit-error-rate (BER). We also compare SCC with subtraction combining and SCC of Sathananthan et al. with maximum ratio combining (MRC). Our results show that SCC-OFDM with subtraction combining gives higher SINR than PCC-OFDM over the flat Rayleigh fading channel and that this superiority is not maintained under multi-path induced frequency-selective fading unless diversity combining is used. A simulation result shows, however, that SCC-OFDM with subtraction combining may perform better than PCC-OFDM for a certain range of Doppler spread when differential modulation is employed. Finally, we also demonstrate that the SCC-OFDM signal has less PAPR compared to the normal OFDM and PCC-OFDM and hence may be more practical.

This letter extends the existent MPL (Max-Plus Linear) state-space representation and proposes a new form that can account for both capacity and order constraints. It is often essential to consider these factors when applying the MPL approach to scheduling problems for production or transportation systems. The derived form is a type of augmented state-representation and can contribute to obtaining the earliest start and completion times for processes in installed facilities.

Space-time block coding is an attractive solution for improving quality in wireless links. In general, the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel is correlated by an amount that depends on the propagation environment as well as the polarization of the antenna elements and the spacing between them. In this paper, asymptotic performance and exact symbol error probability (SEP) of orthogonal space-time block code (STBC) are considered in spatially correlated Rayleigh fading MIMO channel. We derive the moment generating function (MGF) of effective signal-to-noise ration (SNR) after combining scheme at the receiver. Using the MGF of effective SNR, we calculate the probability density function (pdf) of the effective SNR and derive exact closed-form SEP expressions of PAM/PSK/QAM with M-ary signaling. We prove that the diversity order is given by the product of the rank of the transmit and receive correlation matrix. Moreover, we quantify the loss in coding gain due to the spatial correlation. Simulation results demonstrate that our analysis provides accuracy.

We introduce a novel configuration for a multi-user Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system in mobile communication over fast fading channels using space-time block coding (STBC) and adaptive array. The proposed scheme adopts the simultaneous transmission of data and pilot signals which reduces control errors caused by delay of obtaining channel state information (CSI). Data and pilot signals are then encoded using a space-time block code and are transmitted from two transmit antennas. In order to overcome the fast fading problem, implementation of adaptive array using recursive least squares (RLS) algorithms is considered at the base station. Through computer simulation, it is shown that the proposed scheme in this way can overcome Doppler spread in higher frequencies and suppress co-channel interference up to N-1 users for N receiving antennas.

The performance of a real-time networked application can be drastically affected by delays in packets traversing the network. Some real-time applications impose limits for acceptable network delay, and so a packet which is delayed longer than the limit before arriving at its destination is worthless to the flow to which the packet belongs. Not only that, but the rejected packet is also damaging to the quality of other flows in the network, because it may increase the queuing delay for other packets. Therefore, this paper proposes an adaptive scheme using two mechanisms, in which packets experiencing too great a delay are discarded at intermediate nodes based on the delay limit for the application and the delay experienced by each packet. This earlier discarding of packets is expected to improve the overall delay performance of real-time flows competing for network resources when the network is congested. An extensive simulation is conducted, and the results show that the scheme has great potential in improving the delay performance of real-time traffic in both homogeneous and heterogeneous environments in terms of traffic volume and application delay requirements.

Reconstruction of real-world scenes from a set of multiple images is a topic in computer vision and 3D computer graphics with many interesting applications. Attempts have been made to real-time reconstruction on PC cluster systems. While these provide enough performance, they are expensive and less flexible. Approaches that use a GPU hardware-acceleration on single workstations achieve real-time framerates for novel-view synthesis, but do not provide an explicit volumetric representation. This work shows our efforts in developing a GPU hardware-accelerated framework for providing a photo-consistent reconstruction of a dynamic 3D scene. High performance is achieved by employing a shape from silhouette technique in advance. Since the entire processing is done on a single PC, the framework can be applied in mobile environments, enabling a wide range of further applications. We explain our approach using programmable vertex and fragment processors and compare it to highly optimized CPU implementations. We show that the new approach can outperform the latter by more than one magnitude and give an outlook for interesting future enhancements.

This letter presents delayed perturbation bounds (DPBs) for receding horizon controls (RHCs) of continuous-time systems. The proposed DPBs are obtained easily by solving convex problems represented by linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). We show, by numerical examples, that the RHCs have larger DPBs than conventional linear quadratic regulators (LQRs).

Recently, space-time block codes (STBCs) obtained from coordinate interleaved orthogonal designs (CIODs) have attracted considerable attention, due to the advantages of full-diversity transmission and single-symbol decodability. In this letter, we design a novel STBC from CIOD for two transmit antennas. The proposed code guarantees full-diversity and full-rate along with low peak-to-minimum power ratio (PMPR). Furthermore, in contrast to the existing Alamouti code, the performance of the proposed code is not degraded even in severely time-selective fading channels.