For the modeling of multipath propagation in every wireless systems, the ray tracing method has been widely studied. However, large errors may result due to the approximation of geometrical optics in curved surfaces. This paper therefore focused on the curved surfaces and edges, which are difficult to handle in ray tracing. Examples of curved surfaces can be found in arched cross-section tunnels which are common in highway networks of mountainous areas. The traditional ray tracing method of dividing the curved surface into smaller flat plates is not so accurate as the size of smaller plates may not satisfy the geometrical optics assumption, and the reflection point which satisfies Fermat's principle may not exist. In this work, a new ray tracing method is proposed with 2 contributions. The first one is the implementation of the reflection coefficient for curved surfaces in ray tracing. The second is applying the physical optics method on the caustics region. To evaluate these methods, path gain simulation results for an arched cross-section model are compared with measurements made inside an arched tunnel. To further improve the simulation results, the effect of rough surface is introduced, and the results are again compared with measurement.

There are many web sites where net users can post and distribute their illustration images. A typical way to draw a digital illustration is first to draw rough lines on a paper and then to trace the lines on a graphics-tablet by hand. The input lines usually contain fluctuation due to hand-drawing, which limits the quality of illustration. Therefore, it is important to remove the fluctuation and to smooth the lines while maintaining sharp features such as corners. Although naive applications of moving average filters can smooth input lines, they may cause over-smoothing artifacts in which sharp features are lost by the filtering. This paper describes an improved line smoothing method using adaptive moving averages, which smoothes input lines while keeping high curvature points. The proposed method evaluates curvatures of input lines and adaptively controls the filter-size to reduce the over-smoothing artifacts. Experiments demonstrated advantages of the proposed method over the previous method in terms of achieving smoothing effect while still preserving sharp feature preservation.

This report focuses on a design method for gradient index (GRIN) lens antennas with controllable aperture field distributions. First, we derive differential equations representing optical paths in a gradient index medium with two optical surfaces by using geometrical optics, and then we formulate a novel design method for GRIN lens antennas based on these equations. The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is applied as a nonlinear least squares method to satisfy two conditions-focusing and shaping the aperture field distribution-thus realizing a prescribed radiation pattern. The conditions can be fulfilled by optimizing only the index (or permittivity) distribution, whereas the shapes of the optical surfaces remain as free parameters that can be utilized for other purposes, such as reducing reflection losses that occur on the surfaces, as illustrated in this report. A plano-concave GRIN lens is designed as an example, applying the proposed method, to realize a sidelobe level of -30 dB pseudo Taylor distribution, and a maximum sidelobe level of -29.1 dB was observed, indicating it is sufficiently accurate for practical use. In addition, we discuss the convergence of this method considering the relationship between the number of the initial conditions and the differential order of the design equations, factoring in scale invariance of the design equations.

The diffraction by a composite wedge composed of a perfect conductor and a lossy dielectric is investigated using the hidden rays of diffraction (HRD) method. The usual principle of geometrical optics is employed to trace not only ordinary rays incident on the lit boundary but also hidden rays incident on the shadow boundary. The modified propagation constants are adopted to represent the non-uniform plane wave transmission through the lossy dielectric. The HRD diffraction coefficients are constructed routinely by the sum of the cotangent functions, which have one-to-one correspondence with both ordinary and hidden rays. The angular period of the cotangent functions is adjusted to satisfy the edge condition at the tip of the composite wedge. The accuracy of the HRD diffraction coefficients in the physical region is checked by showing how closely the diffraction coefficients in the complementary region satisfy the null-field condition.

Ray tracing is one of the most popular techniques for generating photo-realistic images. Extensive research and development work has made interactive static scene rendering realistic. This paper deals with interactive dynamic scene rendering in which not only the eye point but also the objects in the scene change their 3D locations every frame. In order to realize interactive dynamic scene rendering, RTRPS (Ray Tracing based on Ray Plane and Bounding Sphere), which utilizes the coherency in rays, objects, and grouped-rays, is introduced. RTRPS uses bounding spheres as the spatial data structure which utilizes the coherency in objects. By using bounding spheres, RTRPS can ignore the rotation of moving objects within a sphere, and shorten the update time between frames. RTRPS utilizes the coherency in rays by merging rays into a ray-plane, assuming that the secondary rays and shadow rays are shot through an aligned grid. Since a pair of ray-planes shares an original ray, the intersection for the ray can be completed using the coherency in the ray-planes. Because of the three kinds of coherency, RTRPS can significantly reduce the number of intersection tests for ray tracing. Further acceleration techniques for ray-plane-sphere and ray-triangle intersection are also presented. A parallel projection technique converts a 3D vector inner product operation into a 2D operation and reduces the number of floating point operations. Techniques based on frustum culling and binary-tree structured ray-planes optimize the order of intersection tests between ray-planes and a sphere, resulting in 50% to 90% reduction of intersection tests. Two ray-triangle intersection techniques are also introduced, which are effective when a large number of rays are packed into a ray-plane. Our performance evaluations indicate that RTRPS gives 13 to 392 times speed up in comparison with a ray tracing algorithm without organized rays and spheres. We found out that RTRPS also provides competitive performance even if only primary rays are used.

This paper is concerned with the estimation of radio communication distance when both the transmitter and receiver are arbitrarily distributed on a random rough surface such as desert, terrain, sea surface and so on. First, we simulate electromagnetic wave propagation along the rough surface by using the discrete ray tracing method (DRTM) proposed by authors recently. Second, we determine three parameters by conjugate gradient method (CGM) combined with the method of least-squares. Finally, we derive an analytical expression which can estimate the maximum communication distance when the input power of a transmitter and the minimum detectable electric intensity of a receiver are specified. Random rough surfaces are assumed to be Gaussian, pn-th order power law or exponential distributions.

This paper proposes new techniques to simulate a MIMO propagation channel using the ray-tracing method for the purpose of decreasing the computational complexity. These techniques simulate a MIMO propagation channel by substituting the propagation path between a particular combination of transmitter and receiver antennas for all combinations of transmitter and receiver antennas. The estimation accuracy calculated using the proposed techniques is evaluated based on comparison to the results calculated using imaging algorithms. The results show that the proposed techniques simulate a MIMO propagation channel with low computational complexity, and a high level of estimation accuracy is achieved using the proposed Vector-Rotation Approximation technique compared to that for the imaging algorithm.

This paper describes a proposed propagation estimation method and TCP/IP-based evaluations for mobile communications employing a stratospheric platform. To estimate a wireless channel, a realistic and detailed description of its physical environment must be accurately defined. Therefore, a building distribution model characterizing the physical environment in areas in Japan is presented. The analyses of the propagation estimation method are based on the "ray-tracing" model. The results from the proposed method are derived depending on elevation and azimuth angles. In order to validate our results, comparisons between the proposed method and our previous measurement are made for a typical semi-urban area in Japan. The comparisons show close agreement between the estimation results and the measurement results. Finally and interestingly, we present communication performance evaluations based on TCP/IP protocol by using the results achieved from our channel estimation with semi-analytical and simulation approach.

There has been a wide-ranging discussion on the issue of content copyright protection in digital content distribution systems. Fiat and Tassa proposed the framework of dynamic traitor tracing. Their framework requires dynamic computation transactions according to the real-time responses of the pirate, and it presumes real-time observation of content redistribution. Therefore, it cannot be simply utilized in an application where such an assumption is not valid. In this paper, we propose a new scheme that provides the advantages of dynamic traitor tracing schemes and also overcomes their problems.

Traffic volume anomalies refer to apparently abrupt changes in the time series of traffic volume, which can propagate through the network. Detecting and tracing these anomalies is a critical and difficult task for network operators. In this paper, we first propose a traffic decomposition method, which decomposes the traffic into three components: the trend component, the autoregressive (AR) component, and the noise component. A traffic volume anomaly is detected when the AR component is outside the prediction band for multiple links simultaneously. Then, the anomaly is traced using the projection of the detection result matrices for the observed links which are selected by a shortest-path-first algorithm. Finally, we validate our detection and tracing method by using the real traffic data from the third-generation Science Information Network (SINET3) and show the detected and traced results.

To improve path loss estimation, a ray tracing method for inhomogeneous building surfaces and its verification are presented in this paper. Considering real building surfaces with many heterogeneous materials, the effective specular reflection based on a physical optics (PO) approximation is modeled and applied to the reflection in a ray tracing method. To verify the proposed method, measurement at 2.7 GHz is performed in a complex urban environment. Comparisons between the measurements and the ray tracing results are made in LOS and NLOS environments.

Copyright protection is a major issue in distributing content on Internet or broadcasting service. One well-known method of protecting copyright is a traitor tracing scheme. With this scheme, if a pirate decoder is made, the content provider can check the secret key contained in it and trace the authorized user/subscriber (traitor). Furthermore, users require that they could obtain services anywhere they want (Anywhere TV). For this purpose, they would need to take along their secret keys and therefore key exposure has to be kept in mind. As one of countermeasures against key exposure, a forward secure public key cryptosystem has been developed. In this system, the user secret key remains valid for a limited period of time. It means that even if it is exposed, the user would be affected only for the limited time period. In this paper, we propose a traitor tracing scheme secure against adaptive key exposure (TTaKE) which contains the properties of both a traitor tracing scheme and a forward secure public key cryptosystem. It is constructed by using two polynomials with two variables to generate user secret keys. Its security proof is constructed from scratch. Moreover we confirmed its efficiency through comparisons. Finally, we show the way how its building blocks can be applied to anywhere TV service. Its structure fits current broadcasting systems.

In this study we have employed an effective technique for dosimetric analyses of base station antennas in an underground environment. The technique combines a ray-tracing method and the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to calculate the specific absorption rate (SAR) in the human body. The ray-tracing method was applied to evaluate the incident fields in relation to the exposed subject in a three-dimensional space, while the FDTD method was used to calculate the detailed SAR distributions in the human body. A scenario under an underground passage with the installation of a top-loaded monopole antenna was analyzed to investigate the relationship between the actual antenna exposure and a plane-wave exposure. The results show that the plane-wave exposure overestimated the whole-body average SAR in most cases, although this was not always true for peak SAR. The finding implies not only the usefulness of the present uniform-exposure-based reference level for the whole-body average SAR evaluation but also the necessity of modeling actual underground environment for high-precision local peak SAR evaluation.

Collusion-secure codes are used for digital fingerprinting and for traitor tracing. In both cases, the goal is to prevent unauthorized copying of copyrighted material, by tracing at least one guilty user when illegal copies appear. The most well-known collusion-secure code is due to Boneh and Shaw (1995/98). In this paper we improve the decoding algorithm by using soft output from the inner decoder, and we show that this permits using significantly shorter codewords.

Electromagnetic (EM) wave absorbers have been used for improving the EM environment of an electronic toll collection (ETC) system on an express highway or a wireless local area network (LAN) system in an indoor environment. In this paper, an efficient multi-ray propagation model, which uses 3D geometry and image techniques to trace multiple signal rays from transmitter to receiver, is employed to analyze the EM environment of a dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) system on an express highway. The validity of the model employed is discussed by the comparison with the results obtained by an experiment on the highways. The analysis shows that the possible undesired communications between onboard equipment that acts as a receiver and DSRC beacon which transmits the radio signals, is improved by increasing the EM wave-absorption capability of the sidewalls and the pavement of the highway. Another advantage of the employed model is that it is effective for investigating the location of wave absorbers to be set up on the highway, and it takes only a fraction of a minute for computation.

Traceability codes are used in schemes that prevent illegal redistribution of digital content. In this Letter, we use Chinese Reminder Theorem codes to construct traceability codes. Both the code parameters and the traitor identification process take into account the non-uniformity of the alphabet of Chinese Reminder Theorem codes. Moreover it is shown that the identification process can be done in polynomial time using list decoding techniques.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) eigenbeam space division multiplexing that uses adaptive modulations for substreams is a promising technology for improving transmission capacity. A fundamental drawback of this approach is that the modulation levels determined from the carrier-to-noise ratio at each substream are sometimes overly optimistic so the use of these modulation levels results in transmission errors and diminished transmission performance. A novel method of determining substream modulation levels is proposed that alleviates this degradation. In the proposed method, the expected bit error rates for possible modulations of each substream are calculated from delay profiles. Simulation results indicate that transmission capacity is improved by 30% using the new method compared with the conventional method.

This paper investigates the 10 m semi anechoic chamber using a new type hybrid EM wave absorber consisted of the grid-ferrite and the open-top hollow pyramidal EM wave absorber. We designed a new type hybrid EM wave absorber, which length could be slightly realized 65 cm. The 10 m semi anechoic chamber was constructed in the size of L21.5 mW13.5 mH8.9 m as the result of the ray-tracing simulation using this absorber. Then, the site attenuation in the constructed anechoic chamber was measured by using the broadband calculable dipole antennas. As the result, the maximum deviations between the measured site attenuation and theoretical calculated one were obtained within 3.6 dB in the frequency range of 30 MHz to 300 MHz. It was confirmed the validity of a new type hybrid EM wave absorber. Moreover, it was confirmed that the measured results agree with the ray-tracing simulation results, in which the differences are about 1.5 dB.

The site attenuation is an important parameter to evaluate an anechoic chamber. The ray-tracing method has been applied to analyze it. However, the lowest applicable frequency has not been cleared. In this paper, the FDTD method has been applied to analyze the site attenuation of a compact anechoic chamber from 30 MHz to 250 MHz, and this has been compared with the calculated one by the ray-tracing method to evaluate the lowest frequency where the ray-tracing method could be applied. The compact anechoic chamber, where the absorbers are placed on the all walls, has been used for the calculation. For FDTD analysis, the dipole antenna and the absorber have been modeled by using the large cell, whose size is larger than the diameter of the antenna element. For verification, the site attenuation of a compact anechoic chamber has been measured and compared with the calculated values by the FDTD method and the ray-tracing method. As the results, the calculated values by the ray-tracing method have larger deviation than the ones by the FDTD method when the frequency is less than 180 MHz.

In order to achieve omni-directional coverages on base station antennas for fixed wireless access systems (FWA), a TM01 mode conical horn with 4.6λ aperture size was employed as a feed horn for an axisymmetrical reflector antenna. Here, a shaped dielectric lens was inserted in the conical horn so as to achieve low sidelobe radiation characteristics. However, it was pointed out that radiation pattern shaping ability was degraded in this small lens antenna. In this paper, deteriorations of aperture distributions in a shaped lens are clarified through FDTD calculations. Severe phase delays are shown in the aperture phase distributions. A novel lens shaping method of compensating the phase delays is developed. Aperture distributions and radiation patterns of the corrected lens are estimated through FDTD calculations. Satisfactory uniform phase distributions in aperture distributions and low sidelobe radiation patterns are ensured.