A reaction-diffusion computer is a large-scale array of elementary processors, micro-volumes of chemical medium, which act, change their states determined by chemical reactions, concurrently and interact locally, via local diffusion of chemical species; it transforms data to results, both represented by concentration profiles of chemical species, by traveling and colliding waves in spatially extended chemical media. We show that reaction-diffusion processors, simulated or experimental, can solve a variety of tasks, including computational geometry, robot navigation, logics and arithmetics.

In this paper we present a new type of CMOS Time-of-Flight (TOF) range image sensor based on CMOS Active Pixel Sensor (APS) techniques. The TOF sensor features high-speed and efficient photo-charge transfer that is essential in range imaging. The rapid and efficient charge transfer is made possible by the use of a high-gain inverting amplifier and capacitors connected alternatively to the feedback path. This leads to the cost-effective implementation of the system. The analysis of simulation results suggests that the proposed technique can achieve a sufficient range resolution of millimeters to centimeters depending on the maximum measured range, if the noise is dominated by photon shot noise.

Application of multipled block codes (MBCs) for realizing new flexible and efficient transmission systems that feature in hunting-free reframing and asynchronous multiplexing is investigated. First, the principles of MBC are overviewed to show the capacities of filterless clock recovery. Then it is shown that modification of simple frame structure of MBC line code can be used for attaining hunting-free reframing for multiplexing systems. Two types of MBCs are developed to this end. While the one uses header blocks for hunting-free reframing, the other uses distributed frame patterns. Header design of multipled block codes (MBC) for hunting-free reframing (HFR) is investigated for frame patterns with and without violation compensation. The feasibility of hunting-free reframing is tested in an experimental system. Application of hunting-free reframing to asynchronous multiplexing is also investigated and tested in an experimental system. Finally, advantages of hunting-free multiplexing systems are discussed.

Spectral-amplitude coding (SAC) techniques in fiber-Bragg-grating (FBG)-based optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) systems were investigated in our previous work. This paper adopts the same network architecture to investigate the simultaneous reductions of multiple-access interference (MAI) and optical beat interference (OBI). The MAI is caused by overlapping wavelengths from undesired network coder/decoders (codecs) while the OBI is induced by interaction of simultaneous chips at adjacent gratings. It is proposed that MAI and OBI reductions may be obtained by use of: 1) a source spectrum that is divided into equal chip spacing; 2) coded FBGs characterized by approximately the same number of "0" and "1" code elements; and 3) spectrally balanced photo-detectors. With quasi-orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard coded FBGs, complementary spectral chips is employed as signal pairs to be recombined and detected in balanced photo-detectors, thus achieving simultaneous suppression of both MAIs and OBIs. Simulation results showed that the proposed OCDMA spectral-amplitude coding scheme achieves significant MAI and OBI reductions.

In this paper, we consider the problem of multicast routing and wavelength assignment (MC-RWA) in multi-fiber all-optical WDM networks. Two main network design system comprehensively investigated here are mesh and multi-ring designs. Given the multicast traffic demands, we present new ILP formulations to solve the MC-RWA problem with an objective to determine the minimal number of fibers needed to support the multicast requests. Unlike previous studies, our ILP formulations are not only capable of finding the optimal multicast routing and wavelength assignment pattern to the light-trees, but also finding the optimal light-tree structures simultaneously. Since broadcast and unicast communications are special cases of multicast communications, our ILP models are actually the generalized RWA mathematical models of optical WDM networks. In addition to proposing the ILP models, this paper takes two main issues affecting the network capacity requirement into account, that is, the splitting degree level of optical splitters and techniques of wavelength assignment to the light-trees. Three multicast wavelength assignment techniques studied in this paper are Light-Tree (LT), Virtual Light-Tree (VLT) and Partial Virtual Light-Tree (PVLT) techniques. Due to the NP-completeness of the MC-RWA problem, the ILP formulations can reasonably cope with small and moderate networks. To work with large networks, this paper presents alternative MC-RWA ILP-based heuristic algorithms for the PVLT and LT networks and develops lower bound techniques to characterize the performance of our algorithms. Using existing large backbone networks, numerical results are reported to analyze such aspects as multiple fiber systems, the benefits of using optical splitters and wavelength converters, and the capacity difference between the mesh and multi-ring designs. Finally, this paper provides an analysis of the influence of network connectivity on the network implementation under the constraints of mesh and multi-ring design schemes.

In this paper, we propose a novel traffic engineering architecture for IP networks with MPLS backbones. In this architecture, two link-disjoint label switched paths, namely the primary and secondary paths, are established among every pair of IP routers located at the edges of an MPLS backbone network. As the main building block of this architecture, we propose that primary paths are given higher priority against the secondary paths in the MPLS data plane to cope with the so-called knock-on effect. Inspired by the ABR flow control mechanism in ATM networks, we propose to split traffic between a source-destination pair between the primary and secondary paths using explicit rate feedback from the network. Taking into consideration the performance deteriorating impact of packet reordering in packet-based load balancing schemes, we propose a traffic splitting mechanism that operates on a per-flow basis (i.e., flow-based multipath routing). We show via an extensive simulation study that using flow-based multipath traffic engineering with explicit rate feedback not only provides consistently better throughput than that of a single path but is also void of out-of-order packet delivery.

This paper presents an application-level QoS comparison of three inter-destination synchronization schemes: the master-slave destination scheme, the synchronization maestro scheme, and the distributed control scheme. The inter-destination synchronization adjusts the output timing among destinations in a multicast group for live audio and video streaming over the Internet/intranets. We compare the application-level QoS of these schemes by simulation with the Tiers model, which is a sophisticated network topology model and reflects hierarchical structure of the Internet. The comparison clarifies their features and finds the best scheme in the environment. The simulation result shows that the distributed control scheme provides the highest quality of inter-destination synchronization among the three schemes in heavily loaded networks, while in lightly loaded networks the other schemes can have almost the same quality as that of the distributed control scheme.

This paper presents a new template matching method based on marker-controlled watershed segmentation (TMCWS). It is applied to recognize numbers on special metal plates in production lines where traditional image recognition methods do not work well. TMCWS is a shape based matching method that uses different pattern images and their corresponding marker images as probes to explore a gradient space of an unknown image to determine which pattern best matches a target object in it. Different from other matching algorithms, TMCWS firstly creates a marker image for each pattern, and then takes both the pattern image and its corresponding marker image as a template window and shifts this window across a gradient space pixel by pixel to do a search. At each position, the marker image is used to try to extract the contour of the target object with the help of marker-controlled watershed segmentation, and the pattern image is employed to evaluate the extracted shape in each trial. All of the pattern images and their corresponding marker images are tried and the pattern that best matches the target object is the recognition result. TMCWS contains shape extraction procedures and it is a high-level template matching method. Experiments are performed with this method on nearly 400 images of metal plates and the test results show its effectiveness in recognizing numbers in noisy images.

In providing video programs to a number of clients through networks, a broadcasting approach is more appropriate than a true-video-on-demand approach in efficient use of bandwidth. However, the broadcasting approach also needs excessively wide bandwidth if many video programs are to be transmitted. This study presents a very simple but novel architecture called dynamic channel broadcasting, for video-on-demand systems. The proposed architecture uses both static and dynamic broadcasting channels to improve the efficiency of channels. The proposed architecture eliminates the necessity of dividing each video into segments and switching channels frequently unlike the pyramid broadcasting, the skyscraper broadcasting and the harmonic broadcasting. Also this new architecture needs a smaller buffer size. The numerical results demonstrate that the newly proposed approach in some cases requires only 14% of the bandwidth required for the conventional broadcasting while maintaining the start-up latency.

We design a DAB system using space-time coding for reliable transmission in the multipath fading channel. This letter assess the performance evaluation of space-time coded DAB system. For channel estimation in the space-time coded DAB system, we introduce two training sequences and derive the mean square error of each training sequence. We then represent the average symbol error rate of the space-time coded DAB system for the specific cases of two, three, four transmit antennas.

The traditional methods of HMM, although highly successful in 1-D time series analysis, have not yet been successfully extended to 2-D image analysis while fully exploiting the hierarchical design and extension of HMM networks for complex structured signals. Apart from the traditional method off-line training of the Baum-Welch algorithm, we propose a new method of real time creation of word or composite character HMMs for 2-D word/character patterns. Unlike the Latin words in which letters run left-to-right, the composition of word/character components need not be linear, as in Korean Hangul and Chinese characters. The key idea lies in the character composition at the image level and the image-to-model conversion followed by redundancy reduction. Although the resulting model is not optimal, the proposed method has much greater advantage in regard to memory usage and training difficulty. In a series of experiments in character/word spotting in document images, the system recorded the hit ratios of 80% and 67% in Hangul character and word spotting respectively without language models.

A multi-hop wireless local area network (LAN) is an ad-hoc wireless network that connects to the Internet backbone via an access point. Routing paths between mobile hosts and a fixed host can be divided into two sub-paths, wireless and wired. In this paper, we apply the Hierarchical Routing Tree (HRT) concept to finding wireless sub-paths. That is, by constructing an HRT, each mobile host can find a routing path to an access point (i.e., the HRT root) quickly and thus gain the access to Internet. In addition, we choose the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol as a point-to-point routing method for sources and destinations located in the same ad-hoc network in order to improve upon a weakness in the HRT method. Numerical experiments are given to show the effectiveness of the hybrid routing method.

This paper proposes dynamic distributed unicast and multicast routing algorithms for multiple classes of QoS guaranteed networks. Each link in such a network is assumed to be able to provide multiple classes of QoS guarantee by reserving various amounts of resource. A distributed unicast routing algorithm, DCSP (Distributed Constrained Shortest Path), for finding a QoS constrained least cost path between each O-D (Originating-Destination) pair, is proposed first. Two class reduction schemes, the linear and logarithmic policies, are develpoed to prevent exponential growth of the number of end-to-end QoS classes. Based on DCSP, two distributed multicast routing algorithms, DCSPT (Distributed Constrained Shortest Path Tree) and DTM (Distributed Takahashi and Mutsuyama), are proposed to find QoS constrained minimum cost trees. Numerical results indicate that DCSP strongly outperforms previously proposed centralized algorithms and it works better with the linear class reduction method. For the multicast routing algorithms, the DCSPT with linear class reduction method yields the best performance of all multicast routing algorithms.

This paper presents a path compression protocol for on-demand ad hoc network routing protocols, which is called dynamic path shortening (DPS). In DPS, active route paths adapt dynamically to node mobility based on the "local" link quality estimation at each own node, without exchanging periodic control packets such as Hello messages. Each node monitors its own local link quality only when receiving packets and estimates whether to enter the "proximity" of the neighbor node to shorten active paths in a distributed manner. Simulation results of DPS in several scenarios of various node mobility and traffic flows reveal that adding DPS to DSR which is the conventional prominent on-demand ad hoc routing protocol significantly reduces the end-to-end packet latency up to 50-percent and also the number of routing packets up to 70-percent over the pure DSR, in heavy traffic cases. We also demonstrate the other simulation results obtained by using our two novel mobility models which generate more realistic node mobility than the standard random waypoint mobility model: Random Orientation Mobility and Random Escape Mobility models. Finally, simple performance experiments using DPS implementation on FreeBSD OS demonstrate that DPS shortens active routes in the order of milliseconds (about 5 ms).

This paper proposes two types of network architectures using UMTS Release 5 architecture and wireless LAN suitable for context-aware information delivery and personal communication services, and it reports on preliminary evaluations of their performance. The first type of network architecture is the NCA (network-centric architecture) and the second is the ECA (end-user-centric architecture). The two architectures are modeled with a queuing network and their response times are compared through theoretical analysis and simulation. The results indicate that with low-performance servers, the response times of the ECA are generally shorter or almost the same as those of the NCA. However with high-performance servers, the response times of the NCA are generally shorter except during high server utilization.

In future high-speed networks, provision of diverse multimedia services with strict quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, such as bandwidth, delay and so on, is desired. QoS routing is a possible solution to handle these services. Generally, a path selection for QoS routing is formulated as a shortest path problem subject to multiple constraints. However, it is known to be NP-complete when more than one QoS constraint is imposed. As a result, many heuristic algorithms have been proposed so far. The authors proposed a path selection algorithm Fallback+ for QoS routing, which focuses not only on the path selection with multiple constraints but also on the efficient use of network resources. This paper proposes an enhanced version of Fallback+, named Enhanced Fallback+, where in a shrewd way, it keeps tentative paths produced in the conventional Fallback algorithm with Dijkstra's algorithm. Simulation experiments prove the excellent performance of Enhanced Fallback+, compared with the original Fallback+ and other existing path selection algorithms.

This paper presents a mobility management scheme that combines host-based routing (HBR) with prefix routing to achieve balanced loading of network nodes in a distributed hierarchically arranged mobile IPv6 access network. This allows the higher-level nodes to be less loaded than in pure host based routing schemes, where the root node presents a capacity bottleneck to the system. As a result, this scheme achieves good savings in memory by reducing host-specific caches, and thus enhances network scalability. A direct consequence of reduced database entry is reduced processing latencies at the nodes, which reduces delay and improves on network performance. Our hybrid HBR scheme performs better than the pure HBR schemes in memory conservation and increased network capacity.

The AODV (Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector) protocol is one of the typical reactive routing protocols in Ad Hoc networks, in that mobile nodes initiate routing activities only in the presence of data packets in need of a route. In this paper, we focus upon the local repair mechanism of AODV. When a link is broken, the upstream node of the broken link repairs the route to the destination by initiating a local route discovery process. The process involves the flooding of AODV control messages in every node within a radius of the length from the initiating node to the destination. In this paper, we propose an efficient local repair scheme for AODV, called AELR (AODV-based Efficient Local Repair). AELR utilizes the existing routing information in the downstream intermediate nodes which have been on the active route to the destination before a link break occurs. AELR can reduce the flooding range of AODV control messages and the route recovery time for route recovery because it can repair a route through the nearby downstream intermediate nodes. The performance results show that AELR can achieve faster route recovery than the local repair mechanism of AODV.

The hardware implementation of a neural network model using stochastic logic has been able to integrate numerous neuron units on a chip. However, the limitation of applications occurred since the stochastic neurosystem could execute only discrete-time dynamics. We have contrived a neuron model with continuous-time dynamics by using stochastic calculations. In this paper, we propose the circuit design of a new neuron circuit, and show the fabricated neurochip comprising 64 neurons with experimental results. Furthermore, a new asynchronous updating method and a new activation function circuit are proposed. These improvements enhance the performance of the neurochip greatly.

This paper analyzes program and erase mechanisms for Floating Channel type Surrounding Gate Transistor (FC-SGT) Flash memory cells for the first time. In FC-SGT Flash memory cell, control gate, floating gate, drain and source is arranged vertically on the substrate. The body region is isolated from the substrate by the bottom source region. The cell is programmed by applying a high positive voltage to the control gate electrode with drain and source electrodes grounded. Erasing is performed by applying a high positive voltage to the drain and source electrodes with the control gate electrode grounded. The physical models for program and erase operations in FC-SGT Flash memory cell are developed. Program and erase operations based on the developed physical models are simulated by utilizing a device simulator. Program and erase characteristics obtained from the device simulation agree well with the results of analytical models. The FC-SGT Flash memory cell can realize program and erase operation with a floating body structure.