We present a new scheduling policy named Value-based Processor Allocation (VPA-k) for scheduling value-based transactions in a multiprocessor real-time database system. The value of a transaction represents the profit the transaction contributes to the system if it is completed before its deadline. Using VPA-k policy, the transactions with higher values are given higher priorities to execute first, while at most k percentage of the total processors are allocated to the urgent transactions dynamically. Through simulation experiments, VPA-k policy is shown to outperform other scheduling policies substantially in both maximizing the totally obtained values and minimizing the number of missed transactions.

This letter proposes a Perfect-Reconstruction (PR) encryption scheme based on a PR QMF bank. Using the proposed scheme, signals can be encrypted and reconstructed perfectly by using two Periodically Time-Varying (PTV) digital filters respectively. Also we find that the proposed scheme has a "good" encryption effect and compares favorably with frequency scramble in the aspects of computation complexity, PR property, and degree of security.

An econominal implementation of a chaos circuit onto the hardware is an important subject. In this letter, a two-dimensional digital chaos circuit realizing a Henon map is designed. Concerning the attractor and the bifurcation diagram of the proposed circuit, numerical simulations are performed to confirm the validity of the circuit algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed digital chaos circuit is designed by Verilog-HDL (Hardware Description Language). The proposed digital chaos circuit can be implemented into the form of the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array).

Parallelism on heterogeneous machines brings cost effectiveness, but also raises a new set of complex and challenging problems. This paper addresses the problem of estimating the minimum time taken to execute a program on a fine-grained parallel machine composed of different types of processors. In an earlier publication, we took the first step in this direction by presenting a graph-construction method which partitions a given program into several homogeneous parts and incorporates timing constraints due to heterogeneous parallelism into each part. In this paper, to make the method easier to be applied in a scheduling framework and to demonstrate its practical utility, we present an efficient implementation method and compare the results of its use to the optimal schedule lengths obtained by enumerating all possible solutions. Experimental results for several different machine models indicate that this method can be effectively used to estimate a program's minimum execution time.

This paper proposes a time-interval data model in which all temporal representation and operations can be expressed with time intervals. The model expresses not only real time intervals, in which an event exists, but also null time intervals, in which an event is suspended. We model the history of a real-world event as a composite time interval, which is defined in this paper. Operations on the composite time intervals are also defined, and it is shown how these operations can be used to express temporal constraints with time intervals.

We propose new key exchange and authentication protocols, which are efficient in protecting a poorly-chosen weak secret from guessing attacks, based on the use of a one-time pad and a strong one-way hash function. Cryptographic protocols assume that a strong secret should be shared between communication participants for authentication, in the light of an ever-present threat of guessing attacks. Cryptographically long secret would be better for security only if ordinary users could remember it. But most users choose an easy-to-remember password as a secret and such a weak secret can be guessed easily. In our previous work, we made much of introducing a basic concept and its application. In this paper, we describe our idea in more detail and propose more protocols which correspond to variants of our basic protocol using well-defined notations. Formal verification and efficiency comparison of the proposed protocols are also presented. By our scheme the password guessing attacks are defeated efficiently, and a session key is exchanged and participants are authenticated securely.

Time spread (TS) pulse position modulation (PPM) signals have been proposed for CDMA applications, where the envelope detection is employed instead of coherent detection for easier synchronization of PPM. In this paper, a new method of deriving symbol error probability (SEP) of TS PPM signals in the presence of interference is introduced. The analysis is based on the moment technique. The maximum entropy criterion for estimating an unknown probability density function (PDF) from its moments is applied to the evaluation of PDF of envelope detector output. Numerical results of SEP are shown for 4, 8 and 16PPM in the practical range of signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) and signal-to-interference power ratio (SIR) of 5, 10 and 20 dB. SEP by the union bound is also given for comparison. From the results it is noted that when PPM multilevel number is small, the union bound goes near to SEP by the proposed method, but when it increases the difference of the SEP by the bound and proposed method becomes larger. The effect of central frequency offset of TS-filter is evaluated as an illustrative example.

In this paper a public key certification scheme, which protects privacy of user of the public key certificate, is proposed. In the proposed scheme a certification authority issues anonymous public key certificates, with which a certificate user having his/her own secret key can make use of public key cryptography and a certificate verifier can confirm the authenticity of the cryptographic communication of the certificate user. The anonymity of their users is preserved against the verifier. In general, user's activities should not be linked each other from the viewpoint of privacy protection. The use of the same certificate results in the linkage of the cryptographic communications. So, ideally, a certificate should be used only once, and such a certificate is called a one-time certificate. In the proposed scheme one-time certificates are realized with low cost of communication and computation for the certificate user. Multiple certificates can be issued without interaction between CA and the user. The additional computation of the user to obtain a new anonymous public key certificate is one modular exponentiation. In addition, only one secret key is required for multiple certificates. Therefore, the proposed scheme is useful for applications which require anonymity, unlinkability, and efficiency.

Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) designers have two major problems with regard to the production of practical, portable multimedia communication systems. The first is the difficulty of achieving both fast lock time and low jitter operation simultaneously. This can be particularly difficult because the increase in loop stability needed to reduce jitter increases the lock time. The second is the problem caused by circuits operating at low voltage supplies. Low voltage supplies adversely effect the performance of phase-frequency detectors and charge pump circuits, and they can decrease the noise immunity of oscillators. We have developed a hot-standby architecture, which can achieve both fast lock time and low jitter operation simultaneously, and low-voltage circuit techniques, such as a noise-immune adaptive-gain voltage-controlled oscillator, for a fabricated PLL. This PLL is fully integrated onto a 480-µm450-µm die area with 0.18-µm CMOS technology. It can operate from 0.5 V to 1.2 V, and with a lock range from 40 MHz to 170 MHz at 0.5 V. The jitter is less than 200 ps and the lock time is less than 500 ns.

An MT connector assembly machine has been designed and developed. The connector assembly time using this machine is about 30% less than with the conventional method. The MT connectors assembled employing this machine have a low connection loss and stable mechanical characteristics.

This paper presents a proportional-share CPU scheduler which can support multimedia applications in a general-purpose workstation environment. For this purpose, we have extended the stride scheduler which is designed originally for conventional tasks. New scheduling parameters are introduced to specify timing requirements of multimedia applications. Through the use of the rate regulator, the accuracy error of the scheduling is reduced to 0 (1). Separate task groups are proposed to represent both relative shares and absolute shares. The proposed scheduler is evaluated using a simulation study. The results show that the proposed scheduler achieves improved accuracy and adaptability as well as flexibility.

A slotted ALOHA direct sequence spread spectrum system with random signatures is considered. The system is applicable in cases where a large number of terminals transmit to a single hub station like in cellular digital radio, personal mobile systems and wireless LANs. It is shown that significant improvements in packet throughput capacity are obtained if the adaptive receiver structures are used. Systems for the comparison are the spread spectrum slotted ALOHA system and the conventional slotted ALOHA system.

Recently, progress has been made in the area of electrical modeling of conductors embedded in arbitrary dielectrics using circuit oriented techniques. These models usually occur in conjunction with VLSI type circuits. Many different applications exist today for such models in the EMI, EIP (Electrical Interconnect and Package) analysis as well as for the microwave circuit area. Practical problems involve a multitude of hardware components and they demand a wide spectrum of both time as well as frequency domain solution techniques. In this paper we consider circuit oriented techniques for the solution of these problems. Specifically, we give an outline of the three dimensional Partial Element Equivalent Circuit (PEEC) full wave modeling approach and review the recent progress in this area.

Let {Xk}k=- be a stationary and ergodic information source, where each Xk takes values in a standard alphabet A with a distance function d: A A [0, ) defined on it. For each sample sequence X = (, x-1, x0, x1, ) and D > 0 let the approximate D-match recurrence time be defined by Rn (x, D) = min {m n: dn (Xn1, Xm+nm+1) D}, where Xji denotes the string xixi+1 xj and dn: An An [0, ) is a metric of An induced by d for each n. Let R (D) be the rate distortion function of the source {Xk}k=- relative to the fidelity criterion {dn}. Then it is shown that lim supn-1/n log Rn (X, D) R (D/2) a. s.

In this Letter, we investigate the loss performance of a discrete-time single-server queueing system with periodic vacations, with which we are often confronted in traffic control, such as cell scheduling or priority control schemes, at ATM nodes. Explicit expressions are derived for the cell loss ratio in terms of the distribution of the buffer contents in an infinite capacity queue.

Scattering data from radar targets are analyzed in the time-frequency domain by using wavelet transform, and the scattering mechanisms are investigated. The wavelet transform used here is a powerful tool for the analysis of scattering data, because it can provide better insights into scattering mechanisms that are not immediately apparent in either the time or frequency domain. First, two types of wavelet transforms that are applied to the time domain data and to the frequency domain data are defined, and the multi-resolution characteristics of them are discussed. Next, the scattering data from a conducting cylinder, two parallel conducting cylinders, a parallel-plate waveguide cavity, and a rectangular cavity in the underground are analyzed by using these wavelet transforms to reveal the scattering mechanisms. In the resulting time-frequency displays, the scattering mechanisms including specular reflection, creeping wave, resonance, and dispersion are clearly observed and identified.

Distributed multimedia applications are often sensitive to the Quality of Service (QoS) provided by the communication network. They usually require guaranteed QoS service, so that real-time communication is possible. However, searching a route with multiple QoS constraints is known to be a NP-complete problem. In this paper, we propose a new simple and efficient distributed QoS routing algorithm, called "DQoSR," for supporting real-time communication in high-speed networks. It searches a route that could guarantee bandwidth, delay, and delay jitter requirements. Routing decision is based only on the modified cost, hop and delay vectors stored in the routing table at each node and its directly connected neighbors. Moreover, DQoSR is proved to construct loop-free routes. Its worst case message complexity is O(|V|2), where |V| is the number of nodes in the network. Thus DQoSR is fast and scales well to large networks. Finally, extensive simulations show that average rate of establishing successful connection of DQoSR is very near to optimum (the difference is less than 0.4%).

Satellite beam-switching problems are studied where there are m up-link beams, n down-link beams and multiple carriers per beam. By augmenting a traffic matrix with an extra row and column, it is possible to find a sequence of switching modes ((0,1)-matrices with genrally multiple unit entries in each row and column) that realize optimal transmission time. Switching modes generated are shown to be linearly independent. The number of switching modes required for an mn matrix is bounded by (m1)(n1)1. For an augmented (m1)(n1) matrix, the bound is then mn1. The bounds on the number of switching modes and the computational complexity for a number of related satellite transmission scheduling problems are lowered. In simplified form, the results (particularly the linear independence of permutation matrices generated) apply to algorithmic decomposition of doubly stochastic matrices into convex combinations of permutation matrices.

This paper evaluates the performance of TCP over ATM by simulation studies to clarify its applicability to high-speed WANs. We compared the performance of TCP over ABR with that of TCP over UBR, and TCP over UBR with Early Packet Discard (EPD). As for TCP over UBR, TCP has all responsibilities for end-to-end performance. In this case, cell loss at the ATM layer degrades TCP performance. Optimum tuning of TCP parameters may mitigate this degradation problem, but cannot solve it. Using EPD with UBR can fairly reduce useless transmission of corrupted packets and improve TCP performance, but still have the problem on fairness. As a result, TCP over ABR was proved to be the most effective as long as it suppressed cell loss. It was also proved that, if we want to extract best performance by TCP over ABR, we need to choose TCP parameters such as window size or timer granularity, so that ABR rate control does not interact with TCP window control and retransmission control.

Most of current real time video retrieval systems use video transfer protocols such that servers simply transmit video packets in the same rate as clients play them. If any packets are corrupted during transmission, they will be lost and cannot be recovered by retransmission. In video retrieval systems, however, teh video data are stored in servers and clients can prefetch them prior to playing. So, it might be possible for the video retrieval systems to make corrupted video packets retransmitted before the play-out dead line. But the application of existing reliable protocols causes problems such that, if a packet does not arrive before the dead line due to retransmission, the packets following it will not be delivered to the upper layer even if they have already arrived. In this paper, we discuss how to apply reliable protocols to real time video retrieval systems and propose an new real time video transfer protocol over ATM network, which provides the video data prefetch, the flow control for video buffer, the selective retransmission with skipping function for video packets late for the play-out dead line, and the resynchronization function for video buffer. We have implemented an experimental system using our protocol and evaluated the performance. The results of performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol decreases the number of unplayed video data largely when transmission errors are inserted in an ATM network.