This paper proposes a network tomography scheme for information-centric networking (ICN), which we call ICN tomography. When content is received over a conventional IP network, the communication occurs after converting the content name into an IP address, which is the locator, so as to identify the position of the network. By contrast, in ICN, communication is achieved by directly specifying the content name or content ID. The content is sent to the requesting user by a nearby node having the content or cache, making it difficult to apply a conventional network tomography that uses end-to-end quality of service (QoS) measurements and routing information between the source and destination node pairs as input to the ICN. This is because, in ICN, the end-to-end flow for an end host receiving some content can take various routes; therefore, the intermediate and source nodes can vary. In this paper, we first describe the technical challenges of applying network tomography to ICN. We then propose ICN tomography, where we use the content name as an endpoint to define an end-to-end QoS measurement and a routing matrix. In defining the routing matrix, we assume that the end-to-end flow follows a probabilistic routing. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through a numerical analysis and simulation.

We propose a novel contention window management algorithm that adjusts contention window size in dense wireless network environments. In the algorithm, a station estimates the number of neighboring stations by observing its number of freezes while attempting wireless channel accesses. Then, station adopts a new contention window size for further frame transmissions. We evaluate the proposed algorithm with the NS-3 simulator. The simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms existing works in terms of delay, throughput, collision rate, and frame delivery ratio.

We developed a mantle-cloak antenna by controlling the surface reactance of a dielectric-loaded dipole antenna. First, a mantle-cloak antenna with an assumed ideal metasurface sheet was designed, and band rejection characteristics were obtained by controlling the surface reactance of the mantle cloak. The variable range of the frequency spacing between the operating and stopband frequencies of the antenna was clarified by changing the value of the surface reactance. Next, a mantle-cloak antenna that uses vertical strip conductors was designed to clarify the characteristics and operating principle of the antenna. It was confirmed that the stopband frequency was 1130MHz, and the proposed antenna had a 36.3% bandwidth (|S₁₁| ≤ -10dB) from 700 to 1010MHz. By comparing the |S₁₁| characteristics and the input impedance characteristics of the proposed antenna with those of the dielectric-loaded antenna, the effect of the mantle cloak was confirmed. Finally, a prototype of the mantle-cloak antenna that uses vertical strip conductors was developed and measured to validate the simulation results. The measurement results were consistent with the simulation results.

In this paper, a linear array of 4 leaf-shaped bowtie slot antennas is proposed for use in quasi-millimeter wave band. The slot antennas array is designed to operate at 28GHz frequency band. The leaf-shaped bowtie slot antenna is a type of self-complementary antenna with low profile and low cost of fabrication. The proposed antenna structure offers improvement in radiation pattern, gain, and -10dB impedance bandwidth. Through out of this paper radiation pattern, actual gain, and -10dB impedance bandwidth are evaluated by Finite Different Time Domain (FDTD) simulation. Antenna characteristics are analyzed in the frequency range of 27GHz to 29GHz. To improve antenna characteristics such as actual gain and -10dB impedance bandwidth, a dielectric superstrate layer with relative permittivity of 10.2 is placed on top of ground plane of the slot antennas array. Three antenna structures are introduced and compared. With two layers of dielectric superstrate on top of the antennas ground plane, analysis results show that -10dB impedance bandwidth occupies the frequency range of 27.17GHz to 28.39GHz. Therefore, the operational impedance bandwidth is 1.22GHz. Maximum actual gain of the slot antennas array with two dielectric superstrate layers is 20.49dBi and -3dB gain bandwidth occupies the frequency range of 27.02GHz to 28.57GHz. To validate the analysis results, prototype of the designed slot antennas array is fabricated. Characteristics of the slot antennas array are measured and compared with the analysis results.

Various electromagnetic (EM) wave applications have become commonplace, and humans are frequently exposed to EM waves. Therefore, the effect of EM waves on the human body should be evaluated. In this study, we focused on the specific absorption rate (SAR) due to the EM waves emitted from smartphones, developed high-resolution numerical smartphone models, and studied the SAR variation by changing the position and tilt angle (the angle between the display of the smartphone model and horizontal plane) of the smartphone models vis-à-vis the human abdomen, assuming the use of the smartphone at various tilt angles in front of the abdomen. The calculations showed that the surface shape of the human model influenced the SAR variation.

In this paper, a macro cell switching scheme for distributed antennas is proposed. In conventional distributed antenna transmission (DAT), the macro cell to which each antenna belongs is fixed. Though a cell-free system has been investigated because of its higher system throughput, the implementation cost of front-hauls can be excessive. To increase the flexibility of resource allocation in the DAT with moderate front-haul complexity, we propose the macro cell switching of distributed antennas (DAs). In the proposed scheme, DAs switch their attribution macro cells depending on the amount of pre-assigned connections. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the proposed scheme realizes a better system throughput than the conventional system, especially when the number of user equipments (UEs) is smaller and the distance between DAs are larger.

In this paper, two-stage BP detection is proposed for overloaded MIMO. The proposal combines BP with the MMSE pre-cancellation algorithm followed by normal BP detection. In overloaded MIMO systems, the loops in a factor graph degrade the demodulation performance of BP detection. MMSE pre-cancellation reduces the number of connections or coefficient values in the factor graph which improves the convergence characteristics of posteriori probabilities. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the BERs of the proposed two-stage BP detection outperforms the conventional BP with MMSE pre-cancellation in a low bit energy range when the MMSE block size is four and the number of MMSE blocks is one. When the pre-cancellation is applied for complexity reduction, the proposed scheme reduces multiplication operations and summation operations by the same factor of 0.7 though the amount of the performance improvement to the conventional scheme is limited.

This paper presents a driver status monitoring (DSM) system with body channel communication (BCC) technology to acquire the driver's physiological condition. Specifically, a conductive thread, the receiving electrode, is sewn to the surface of the seat so that the acquired signal can be continuously detected. As a signal transmission medium, body channel characteristics using the conductive thread electrode were investigated according to the driver's pose and the material of the driver's pants. Based on this, a BCC transceiver was implemented using an analog frequency modulation (FM) scheme to minimize the additional circuitry and system cost. We analyzed the heart rate variability (HRV) from the driver's electrocardiogram (ECG) and displayed the heart rate and Root Mean Square of Successive Differences (RMSSD) values together with the ECG waveform in real-time. A prototype of the DSM system with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology was implemented and tested. We verified that the proposed approach was robust to the driver's movements, showing the feasibility and validity of the DSM with BCC technology using a conductive thread electrode.

High reliability is required, even in Internet of things (IoT) communications, which are sometimes used for crucial control such as automatic driving devices. Hence, both the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) communication quality must be improved in the physical layer. In this study, we focus on the communication quality of broadcast DL, which is configured using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) as a multiplexing scheme and turbo code as forward error correction (FEC). To reduce the frame-error rate (FER) in the DL, we consider two transmit-diversity (TD) techniques that use space-time block code (STBC) or cyclic-delay diversity (CDD). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the TD performance and to enhance FER performance of CDD up to that of STBC. To achieve this goal, a channel estimation method is proposed to improve FER for CDD. For this purpose, we first evaluate the FER performance of STBC and CDD by performing computer simulations and conducting hardware tests using a fading emulator. Then, we conduct field experiments in the 2.5GHz band. From the results of these evaluations, we confirm that STBC and CDD improved FER compared with single antenna transmission. CDD with the proposed channel estimation method achieved almost the same performance as STBC by accurately estimating the channel frequency response (CFR) and appropriately adjusting the amount of cyclic shift (ACS). When moving a received device around Yokosuka Research Park, STBC and CDD, using spatial diversity with omni antennas for TD, improved the FER from 3.84×10^-2 to 1.42×10^-2 and 1.19×10^-2, respectively.

In this paper, we consider the transmission needs of communication networks for two classes of secondary users (SUs), named SU1 and SU2 (lowest priority) in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In such CRNs, primary users (PUs) have preemptive priority over both SU1's users (SU1s) and SU2's users (SU2s). We propose a preemptive scheme (referred to as the P Scheme) and a non-preemptive scheme (referred to as the Non-P Scheme) when considering the interactions between SU1s and SU2s. Focusing on the transmission interruptions to SU2 packets, we present a probabilistic returning scheme with a returning probability to realize feedback control for SU2 packets. We present a Markov chain model to develop some formulas for SU1 and SU2 packets, and compare the influences of the P Scheme and the Non-P Scheme in the proposed probabilistic returning scheme. Numerical analyses compare the impact of the returning probability on the P Scheme and the Non-P Scheme. Furthermore, we optimize the returning probability and compare the optimal numerical results yielded by the P Scheme and the Non-P Scheme.