This letter shows the performance comparisons of several different rate scheduling schemes for non-real time data service over the uplink of burst switching-based direct sequence code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) system to support the integrated voice/data service. The closed-form solution of optimal scheduling formulation, which minimizes average transmission delay when all of the active data users are transmitting simultaneously, is presented and mathematical analyses with other rate scheduling schemes, which provide efficiency criterion of transmission delay for rate scheduling schemes, are performed. Numerical results show the analyses explicitly.

In this paper, we consider QoS-guaranteed wavelength allocation for WDM networks with limited-range wavelength conversion. In the wavelength allocation, the pre-determined number of wavelengths are allocated to each QoS class depending on the required loss probability. Moreover, we consider two wavelength selection rules and three combinations of the rules. We analyze the connection loss probability of each QoS class for a single link using continuous-time Markov chain. We also investigate the connection loss probability for a uni-directional ring network by simulation. In numerical examples, we compare connection loss probabilities for three combinations of selection rules and show how each combination of selection rules affects the connection loss probability of each QoS class. Furthermore, we show how wavelength conversion capability affects the connection loss probability. It is shown that the proposed allocation with appropriate wavelength selection rule is effective for QoS provisioning when the number of wavelengths is large. We also show the effective combination of wavelength selection rules for the case with small wavelength conversion capability.

In order to perform the registration of virtual objects in vision-based augmented reality systems, the estimation of the relation between the real and virtual worlds is needed. This paper presents a three-point vision-based registration method for video see-through augmented reality systems using binocular cameras. The proposed registration method is based on a combination of monocular and stereoscopic registration methods. A correction method that performs an optimization of the registration by correcting the 2D positions in the images of the marker feature points is proposed. Also, an extraction strategy based on color information is put forward to allow the system to be robust to fast user's motion. In addition, a quantification method is used in order to evaluate the stability of the produced registration. Timing and stability results are presented. The proposed registration method is proven to be more stable than the standard stereoscopic registration method and to be independent of the distance. Even when the user moves quickly, our developed system succeeds in producing stable three-point based registration. Therefore, our proposed methods can be considered as interesting alternatives to produce the registration in binocular augmented reality systems when only three points are available.

Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning is a new but challenging research area in the field of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) to support multimedia data communication. However, the existing QoS routing protocols in ad hoc network did not consider a major aspect of wireless environment, i.e., mutual interference. Interference between nodes belonging to two or more routes within the proximity of one another causes Route Coupling. This can be avoided by using zone-disjoint routes. Two routes are said to be zone disjoint if data communication over one path does not interfere with the data communication along the other path. In this paper, we have proposed a scheme for supporting priority-based QoS in MANET by classifying the traffic flows in the network into different priority classes and giving different treatment to the flows belonging to different classes during routing so that the high priority flows will achieve best possible throughput. Our objective is to reduce the effect of coupling between routes used by high and low priority traffic by reserving zone of communication. The part of the network, used for high priority data communication, i.e, high priority zone, will be avoided by low priority data through the selection of a different route that is maximally zone-disjoint with respect to high priority zones and which consequently allows contention-free transmission of high priority traffic. The suggested protocol in our paper selects shortest path for high priority traffic and diverse routes for low priority traffic that will minimally interfere with high priority flows, thus reducing the effect of coupling between high and low priority routes. This adaptive, priority-based routing protocol is implemented on Qualnet Simulator using directional antenna to prove the effectiveness of our proposal. The use of directional antenna in our protocol largely reduces the probability of radio interference between communicating hosts compared to omni-directional antenna and improves the overall utilization of the wireless medium in the context of ad hoc wireless network through Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA).

In this paper, we derive expressions for the bit error probability of QPSK/OFDM on frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. In the OFDM system, ICI (interchannel interference) caused by Doppler spread of the channel degrades the error performance of the system and introduces the error floor even for coherent detection. Analysis results show that the error performance of QPSK/OFDM can be degraded as the normalized maximum Doppler frequency fD /Bsub is increased where fD is the maximum Doppler frequency and Bsub is the subchannel bandwidth. Computer simulations confirm the theoretical analysis results for BPSK and QPSK signals.

Service differentiation has been a subject of research for the past few years in the IETF; and in the current Internet, IP flows are mostly treated in a best-effort approach. However, for next generation networks it is expected that users would like to obtain service differentiation based on their preferences or profiles as well as the different types of multimedia they opt to receive or send. In addition, current Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning architectures have been designed mostly for the fixed networks without taking into consideration the wireless or radio links special requirements, such as low bandwidth availability, error prone communications, etc. In this paper we propose a QoS provisioning architecture for next generation networks that uses a hybrid approach to deal with both the wireless and wired (fixed) part of the network. For administering the scarce resource of the radio environment, we have developed a resource allocation algorithm based on micro-economic principles that uses associated piecewise linear utility functions which describe the benefit a user receives from the allocation of various amounts of resource. For the wired part of the network we have also developed a Core-Stateless Utility based Rate allocation Framework (SURF) for performing traffic policing where the flow's requirements are expressed using utility functions. The core routers maintain no per-flow state and implement a simple packet level admission control algorithm that is based on a threshold utility value that is computed dynamically. To tie in these two mechanisms, we developed a signaling mechanism that collect network statistics when a user starts a call and a QoS administrator entity (or Broker) perform the computations for allocating resources based on the information of available resources in the fixed and the wireless sections of the network. A comparison between the hybrid approach and the SURF approach to show the performance of the proposed architecture is presented later in the paper.

Band Division MC-CDM (BD-MC-CDM) has been proposed for high quality wireless communications and has been investigated in terms of link level performance. In this paper, we investigate frequency band and time slot selection technique from the viewpoint of system level performance in order to realize the efficient BD-MC-CDM system under cellular environments. Then a downlink frequency band and time slot selection scheme is proposed for cellular BD-MC-CDM systems. The proposed scheme selects transmission frequency band according to the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) estimated by using the pilot signal at mobile stations and also selects transmission time slot by using the SIR threshold. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the downlink throughput but degrades delay performance and it has a trade off between throughput and delay performance. By selecting suitable control parameters, the proposed scheme achieves the throughput improvement without sacrificing the delay performance.

We present a novel adaptive method to improve the binarization quality of degraded word color images. The objective of this work is to solve a nonlinear problem concerning the binarization quality, that is, to achieve edge enhancement and noise reduction in images. The digitized data used in this work were extracted automatically from real world photos. The motion of objects with reference to static camera and bad environmental conditions provoked serious quality problems on those images. Conventional methods, such as the nonlinear adaptive filter method proposed by Mo, or Otsu's method cannot produce satisfactory binarization results for those types of degraded images. Among other problems, we note mainly that contrast (between shapes and backgrounds) varies greatly within every degraded image due to non-uniform illumination. The proposed method is based on the automatic extraction of background information, such as luminance distribution to adaptively control the intensity levels, that is, without the need for any manual fine-tuning of parameters. Consequently, the new method can avoid noise or inappropriate shapes in the output binary images. Otsu's method is also applied to automatic threshold selection for classifying the pixels into background and shape pixels. To demonstrate the efficiency and the feasibility of the new adaptive method, we present results obtained by the binarization system. The results were satisfactory as we expected, and we have concluded that they can be used successfully as data in further processing such as segmentation or extraction of characters. Furthermore, the method helps to increase the eventual efficiency of a recognition system for poor-quality word images, such as number plate photos with non-uniform illumination and low contrast.

In order to benefit from the advantages of soft handoff (SHO), it is important that the SHO parameters (the SHO thresholds; T_ADD and T_DROP are well assigned. T_ADD is the threshold used for triggering a pilot with high strength to be added to the Active Set (AS) list. The AS means the pilots associated with the forward traffic channels assigned to mobile station. In contrast, T_DROP is the threshold used for triggering a pilot with low strength to be dropped from the AS list. This paper analyzes the effects of varying SHO thresholds in a cellular code division multiple access (CDMA) system on the blocking probability based on traffic load and geometrical distances in hexagonal layout of base stations (BSs). In addition, the previously proposed traffic load equation is applied to the proposed SHO model for balancing the numbers of new and handoff calls on the forward link capacity in case of uniform traffic load. The results show that the blocking probability is more sensitive to T_DROP than to T_ADD variations.

We propose a new approach associated with the use of some selected sets of Walsh Hadamard codes for joint estimation of channels and the number of transmit antennas by employing only one OFDM pilot symbol. This allows transmit antenna diversity to be applied in systems which have a limited number of training symbols (preambles), e.g. HIPERLAN/2. The proposed approach does not require any a priori knowledge about the number of transmit antennas, providing flexibility in the number of antennas to be used. In addition, adaptive scheme associated with the proposed approach provides more accurate estimations of the channels. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulation. Results show that the proposed scheme provides significant improvement over previous channel estimation schemes and has almost the same performance as the ideal system with the full knowledge of the channel state information.

An Ad Hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. The choice of medium access is difficult in Ad Hoc networks due to the time-varying network topology and the lack of centralized control. In this paper, we propose a novel multichannel schedule-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Ad Hoc networks named Multichannel Reservation Protocol for TDMA-based networks (MRPT). MRPT ensures collision free in successfully reserved data links, even when hidden terminals exist. The reservation of MRPT is based a control channel and in order to improve throughput we propose Four-Phase-Two-Division (FPTD) as a media access scheme of the control channel for broadcasting control or reservation messages. In FPTD, the collision can be solved rapidly with an efficient backoff algorithm which results in that system block is avoided in case of high traffic. In this paper, we also present the throughput performance of MRPT, which shows a high value and no system block even in case of high traffic load.

This letter introduces a novel multi-user detection method, successive interference cancellation based on the order of log-likelihood-ratio(LLR-SIC), for code division multiple access (CDMA) systems. Unlike the conventional successive interference cancellation (SIC) based on the order of correlation, LLR-SIC operates on the fact that the user with the largest absolute value of log-likelihood ratio (LLR) should be first detected and cancelled from received signal. Simulation results show that LLR-SIC significantly outperforms the conventional SIC and partial parallel interference cancellation (P-PIC) over Rayleigh fading channels, and that LLR-SIC performance is not sensitive to channel estimation error at medium Eb/N0.

This paper describes feasibility of a proposed fixed wireless access system with CDMA technology. The system adopts a primary modulation of 16 QAM and the same frequency allocation in all cells to improve spectral efficiency. The system capacity is 1 Gbps per cell within 120 MHz bandwidth. The number of available orthogonal codes corresponds to the orthogonal code length in the system. All subscribers can attain an error free condition with output power control in the presence of inter-cell interference. The following two items are considered to examine the proposed system feasibility. 1) A test modem is fabricated, and a back-to-back modem BER performance is measured. An inter-symbol interference (ISI) level of the modem is estimated with the measured performance. 2) A computer simulation of down-link power control is carried out considering inter-cell interference and impairment factors of the power control such as intra-sector interference caused by the ISI and limited ranges of total and relative output power controls. The simulation results show that the proposed system would be feasible because the obtained power penalties caused by the above impairment factors are negligible.

This paper presents a new method for embedding digital watermarks into Bezier polynomial patches. An object surface is supposed to be represented by multiple piecewise Bezier polynomial patches. A Bezier patch passes through its four-corner control points, which are called data points, and does not pass through the other control points. To embed a watermark, a Bezier patch is divided into two patches. Since each subdivided patch shares two data points of the original patch, the subdivision apparently generates two additional data points on the boundaries of the original patch. We can generate the new data points in any position on the boundaries by changing the subdivision parameters. The additional data points can not be removed without knowing some parameters for subdividing and deforming the patch, hence the patch subdivision enables us to embed a watermark into the surface.

Synchronous Gaussian code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems employing group-orthogonal signature waveforms are proposed and analyzed. All users in the system are divided into groups of users. The signature waveforms are constructed such that all the signature waveforms in one group are orthogonal to all the signature waveforms used in all other groups. This construction of signature waveforms ensures that there is no inter-group interference (i.e., among users in different groups), but at the expense of having intra-group interference (i.e., among users in the same group). However, by choosing a small size for each group, the intra-group interference can be effectively handled by a low-complexity, optimal (or suboptimal) multiuser detector. It is shown that a significant improvement in the system capacity can be achieved by the proposed technique over the conventional one that uses signature waveforms constructed from Welch-bound-equality (WBE) sequences. In particular, it is demonstrated that, while the conventional system's error performance is very sensitive to even small amount of overload, the proposed system with an appropriate design of signature waveforms can achieve a much higher overload (up to 300% as shown in the paper) with an excellent error performance.

This paper deals with a first evaluation of the efficiency and the robustness of the real-time "v-disparity" algorithm in stereovision for generic road obstacles detection towards various types of obstacles (vehicle, pedestrian, motorbike, cyclist, boxes) and under adverse conditions (day, night, rain, glowing effect, noise and false matches in the disparity map). The theoretical good properties of the "v-disparity" algorithm--accuracy, robustness, computational speed--are experimentally confirmed. The good results obtained allow us to use this stereo algorithm as the onboard perception process for Driving Safety Assistance: conductor warning and longitudinal control of a low speed automated vehicle (using a second order sliding mode control) in difficult and original situations, at frame rate using no special hardware. Results of experiments--Vehicle following at low speed, Stop'n'Go, Stop on Obstacle (pedestrian, fallen motorbike, load dropping obstacle)--are presented.

Many carriers are introducing multi-media services to satisfy customer demands for these services. In order to provide such services, carrier must increase their system capacity. It is well known that space division multiple access (SDMA) improves system capacity and is compatible with existing access systems. In order to evaluate the performance of SDMA, we developed an SDMA test bed. The test bed maintains the personal handy phone systems (PHS). The PHS adopts time division multiple access (TDMA). Aiming to compare the performance of SDMA and TDMA using the same analog hardware, the SDMA test bed employs a software-defined radio (SDR) technique. This paper shows the outline and performance of the test bed. The results of laboratory tests indicate that the bit error rate (BER) of the test bed operated in the SDMA mode at under 10-3 when the carrier-tointerference ratio (CIR) was larger than approximately -22 dB. Antenna patterns measured in an anechoic chamber show that the SDMA test bed produces correct antenna patterns when there are three desired signals and one interference signal. The results of the four field tests confirm that the test bed operated while two-multiplex SDMA mode doubled of the traffic and decreased the interference level as compared with the TDMA mode. Furthermore, the test bed operated while threemultiplex SDMA mode improves the traffic about 2.4 to 2.7 times. The SDMA test bed decreased the impact of the adjusted TDMA base station (BS). Therefore, we confirmed that the SDMA improves system capacity without any degradation.

We propose a mathematical model to analyze the performance of TD-CDMA/TDD systems in terms of call blocking probability and then find the optimum time-slot switching-point at the smallest call blocking probability considering asymmetrical traffic load distribution for various kinds of service applications.

In this paper, as an important technology for the software-defined radio, a novel scheme of adaptive array antenna utilizing bandpass sampling technique is proposed. For adaptive signal processing, it is necessary to convert the radio frequency signal received by the antenna that is given by real number into baseband region, i.e., complex number region. Then, the method for dividing the bandpass sampled signal to in-phase and quadrature components is analyzed. The sampling scheme is called the IQ-division bandpass sampling. An adaptive array antenna based on the IQ-division bandpass sampling is characterized by the signal processing at the bandpass sampled signal stage, namely, intermediate frequency stage, not baseband. Finally, we will confirm the validity of the proposed scheme through an experiment in a radio anechoic chamber.

We consider the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem for large-scale WDM optical networks where each transmission request is served by an all-optical lightpath without wavelength conversion. Two heuristic RWA algorithms are proposed in order to minimize the number of wavelengths required for a given set of connection requests. The proposed algorithms are evaluated and compared with the existing algorithms for two realistic networks constructed based on the locations of major cities in Ibaraki Prefecture and those in Kanto District in Japan.