Next Generation Network (NGN) is envisioned to be an inter-working environment of heterogeneous networks of wired and wireless access networks, PSTN, satellites, broadcasting, etc., all interconnected through the service provider's IP backbone and the Internet. NGN uses multiple broadband, QoS-enabled transport technologies and service-related functions independent from underlying transport-related technologies. The operations and management of such interconnected networks are expected to be much more difficult and important than the traditional network environment. In this paper, we present an overview of the current status towards the management of NGN and discuss challenges in operating and managing NGN. We also present the operations and management requirements of NGN in accordance with the challenges. We then present standardization activities of NGN management and some of the notable research and development efforts related to NGN management.

The roaming services with the predefined security associations among the entities in various networks are especially complex. We propose a novel architecture to support future context-aware interoperator roaming services throughout 4G networks by using Roaming Coordinators. We design a secure context management model for the practical use of Smart Cards in the secure roaming services. Our architecture solves the interoperator roaming management problems while minimizing the processing overhead on the mobile nodes.

In a wireless sensor network (WSN), a large number of sensor nodes are deployed over a wide area and multi-hop communications are required between the nodes. Managing numerous sensor nodes is a very complicated task, especially when the energy issue is involved. Even though a number of ad-hoc management and network structuring approaches for WSNs have been proposed, a management framework covering the entire network management infrastructure from the messaging protocol to the network structuring algorithm has not yet been proposed. In this paper we introduce a management framework for WSNs called SNOWMAN (SeNsOr netWork MANagement) framework. It employs the policy-based management approach for letting the sensor nodes autonomously organize and manage themselves. Moreover, a new light-weight policy distribution protocol called TinyCOPS-PR and policy information base (PIB) are also developed. To facilitate scalable and localized management of sensor networks, the proposed SNOWMAN constructs a 3-tier hierarchy of regions, clusters, and sensor nodes. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through actual implementation and simulation using ns-2. The simulation results reveal that the proposed framework allows smaller energy consumption for network management and longer network lifetime than the existing schemes such as LEACH and LEACH-C for practical size networks.

In this paper, we describe a single system image (SSI) architecture for distributed systems. The SSI architecture is constructed through three components: single process space (SPS), process migration, and dynamic load balancing. These components attempt to share all available resources in the cluster among all executing processes, so that the distributed system operates like a single node with much more computing power. To this end, we first resolve broken pipe problems and bind errors on server socket in process migration. Second, we realize SPS based on block process identifier (PID) allocation. Finally, we design and implement a dynamic load balancing scheme. The dynamic load balancing scheme exploits our novel metric, effective tasks, to effectively distribute jobs to a large distributed system. The experimental results show that these three components present scalability, new functionality, and performance improvement in distributed systems.

In the Next-Generation Network (NGN), accommodating a wide variety of customer networks through virtual private network (VPN) technologies is one of the key issues. In particular, a core network provider has to provide bandwidth-assured and secured data transmission for individual private networks while performing optimal and flexible path selection. We present hierarchically distributed path computation elements (HDPCEs) that enable a virtual private network (VPN) provider to guarantee end-to-end required bandwidth and to maintain the secrecy of the link-state information of each customer from other customers. In previous studies, a VPN provider only considered link states in the provider network and did not consider customer domains connected by the provider network. HDPCEs, which are distributed to customer domains, communicate with an HDPCE for the provider network, and these HDPCEs enable the guarantee of necessary bandwidth for a data transmission from one customer domain to another via a provider network. We propose a new path-selection algorithm in each HDPCE and cooperation scheme to interwork HDPCEs, which are suitable for VPN requirements. In the evaluation, the superiority of HDPCE-based VPN path selection over legacy OSPF-TE-based VPN path selection is demonstrated in two typical VPN models: the dedicated model and shared model.

This paper describes IP encapsulation technologies for the Mobile RSVP tunnel in next generation networks. Bandwidth is inherently a scarce network resource, and hence signaling overhead should be minimized as much as possible. However, because of duplicate RSVP messages, the existing RSVP tunnel-based mechanism suffers from bandwidth overhead and tunnel problems. The waste of network resources prevents low-cost network construction and the maximization of integrated network utility, which are the goals of next generation networks, and can lower the reliability of networks with the increase of service subscribers and resultant expansion of resource consumption. To solve these problems and to support end-to-end QoS efficiently, RSVP needs to be changed at a minimum degree. In this paper, a new IP encapsulation mechanism for saving of network resources in the Mobile RSVP tunnel (IPEnc-RSVP) is proposed. In order to compare the proposed mechanism and the existing RSVP tunnel-based mechanism in Mobile IP-based networks, we perform a comparative analysis of bandwidth consumption gain, throughput, mean packet delay, etc., and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed mechanism. In addition, we analyze several performance factors of RSVP protocols by applying the existing RSVP tunnel-based mechanism and the proposed mechanism, respectively.

With the rapid increase of link speed in recent years, packet sampling has become a very attractive and scalable means in collecting flow statistics; however, it also makes inferring original flow characteristics much more difficult. In this paper, we develop techniques and schemes to identify flows with a very large number of packets (also known as heavy-hitter flows) from sampled flow statistics. Our approach follows a two-stage strategy: We first parametrically estimate the original flow length distribution from sampled flows. We then identify heavy-hitter flows with Bayes' theorem, where the flow length distribution estimated at the first stage is used as an a priori distribution. Our approach is validated and evaluated with publicly available packet traces. We show that our approach provides a very flexible framework in striking an appropriate balance between false positives and false negatives when sampling frequency is given.

Quality of service (QoS) control is one of the key technologies for the next-generation network (NGN). In the conventional method, the bearer quality on the carrier network is managed, but the end-to-end QoS for end users needs to be guaranteed. The quality of a public switched telephone network (PSTN) is guaranteed, and the quality of the telephone terminal is also stable. Therefore, end-to-end quality management of PSTN services has been achieved. However, the quality of neither IP networks nor VoIP services is guaranteed in general. In addition, there are numerous VoIP terminals and the differences in their implementations strongly affect the speech quality experienced by end users. Thus, quality management technologies need to be embedded in the VoIP terminal to achieve the equivalent of end-to-end QoS management for the PSTN. These technologies are recommended in IETF RFC3611 "RTCP XR" and ITU-T recommendation P.564 as the framework for end-to-end quality management, but their usage is not shown. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end quality management method for VoIP speech using RTCP XR. We realize an end-to-end QoS monitoring method between the customer and the operator of the carrier network. We define the parameters that should be implemented in RTCP XR packets to estimate the quality of VoIP services based on experimental results.

In this paper, we propose the use of a discrete-time connection oriented Internet service system with a release delay for broadband, high-speed, high-capacity and high-reliability Internet requirements. The release delay called close-delay is set before the release process of a connection. An upper limit length T called timer length is set as a system parameter for the close-delay period. We build a batch arrival Geom^*/G/1 queue model with a setup/close-delay/close-down strategy to characterize the system operation. By using a discrete-time imbedded Markov chain approach, we derive the stationary distribution of the system, and present the formula for Probability Generation Functions of the queue length, waiting time, busy period and busy cycle. Correspondingly, we describe the performance measures for the packet response time, setup ratio, and utility of connection. We also develop a cost model to determine the optimal timer length and its expected optimal cost. Based on numerical results, we discuss the influence of the timer length for the close-delay period on the system performance and investigate the minimum timer length and the minimum cost for different offered loads and different burst degrees, and show that the choice of the timer length is significant in improving the system performance.

We explain how network failures were caused by a natural disaster, describe the restoration steps that were taken, and present lessons learned from the recovery. At 21:26 on December 26th (UTC+9), 2006, there was a serious undersea earthquake off the coast of Taiwan, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. This earthquake caused significant damage to submarine cable systems. The resulting fiber cable failures shut down communications in several countries in the Asia Pacific networks. In the first post-earthquake recovery step, BGP routers detoured traffic along redundant backup paths, which provided poor quality connection. Subsequently, operators engineered traffic to improve the quality of recovered communication. To avoid filling narrow-bandwidth links with detoured traffic, the operators had to change the BGP routing policy. Despite the routing-level first aid, a few institutions could not be directly connected to the R&E network community because they had only a single link to the network. For these single-link networks, the commodity link was temporarily used for connectivity. Then, cable connection configurations at the switches were changed to provide high bandwidth and next-generation Internet service. From the whole restoration procedure, we learned that redundant BGP routing information is useful for recovering connectivity but not for providing available bandwidth for the re-routed traffic load and that collaboration between operators is valuable in solving traffic engineering issues such as poor-quality re-routing and lost connections of single-link networks.

A mobile ad hoc network is an autonomous wireless network which consists of mobile nodes without any base stations. Many routing schemes and services have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. However, since these schemes tend to be evaluated through simulation experiments, it is not known whether they work effectively in real environments or not. Therefore, in order to verify their practical use in mobile ad hoc networks, it is necessary to perform field experiments using actual mobile nodes. If the network size is large, it is difficult to perform field experiments due to problems with limited battery, difficulty of topology control and so on. Realization of rapid topology change of the ad hoc networks topology is especially difficult. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a testing environment for mobile ad hoc network software, which emulates field experiments in wired networks.

In Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks, one of the main problems is collision between bursts. Most of the previous collision avoidance algorithms divide the Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem into two partial problems and treat them separately. This paper focuses on the collision avoidance problem in distributed OBS networks. Our proposal involves cooperation between the routing and the wavelength assignment tasks. The main idea is to classify each wavelength at an output link of a node as suited either to sending or to relaying data bursts. The wavelength most suitable for transmitting bursts changes along the transmission route. Thus, we introduced a novel index called the "Suitability Index" (SI). The SI is a priority index assigned to each pair of output link and wavelength, and its value represents the suitability of that pair for sending or relaying data bursts. The proposed method uses the SI for both routing selection and wavelength assignment. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the burst loss probability, particularly for long distance transmissions. As a result, unfairness in the treatment of short hop and long hop bursts can be reduced.

In order to find paths guaranteed by Quality of Service (QoS), the link state database (LSDB), containing QoS constraint information, and residing in routers, needs to be well managed. However, there is a trade-off between the exact reflection of the current link status and the update cost to calculate and maintain this data. In order to perfectly reflect the current link state, each router immediately notifies its neighbors whenever link state information changes. However, this may degrade the performance of the router. On the other hand, if current link state information is not updated routinely, route setup requests may be rejected because of the discrepancy between the current link state information and the previously updated link state information in the LSDB. Therefore, we need link state update (LSU) algorithms making it possible to appropriately update the LSDB. In addition, to facilitate implementation, they also should have low-complexity and must be adaptive under the variation of network conditions. In this paper, we propose an enhanced simple-adaptive (ESA) LSU algorithm, to reduce the generation of LSU messages while maintaining simplicity and adaptivity. The performance of this algorithm is compared with five existing algorithms by rigorous simulations. The comparision shows that the ESU algorithm can adapt to changes in network conditions and its performance is superior to existing LSU algorithms.

Wireless mesh networks are attracting more and more attention as a promising technology for the next generation access infrastructure. QoS support is a unavoidable task given the rising popularity of multimedia applications, and also a challenging task for multi-hop wireless mesh networks. Among the numerous QoS factors, end-to-end delay is one of the most critical and important issues, especially for the real time applications. Over multi-hop wireless mesh networks, end-to-end delay of a flow is highly dependant on the number of hops as well as congestion condition of the hop nodes that the flow traverses through. In this paper, we propose QoS priority control schemes based on the end-to-end QoS delay metrics in order to increase traffic accommodation, i.e., the numbers of real-time flows which satisfy the requirements of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio over multi-hop wireless mesh networks. The first scheme enables source and forwarding nodes to perform priority control based on the number of hops of routes. The second scheme enables nodes to perform priority control based on the congestion condition of the hop nodes, where the flow traverses through. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is investigated with NS-2 network simulator for voice and video traffics over multi-hop wireless mesh networks. Simulation results show that the scheme greatly improves the traffic accommodation for voice and video applications in multi-hop wireless mesh networks.

With the spread of broadband and wireless Internet access, there is a growing need for a nomadic network environment that enables the use of network services anywhere, via various access media. In a nomadic network environment, however, the connectivity is decreased because users move among different access networks, and the bandwidth is narrow and fluctuating, especially for radio propagation in wireless networks. To solve these problems, we propose a multilink system with three key functions: IPinIP tunneling, dynamic distribution of packets, and reordering of distributed packets. In particular, our distribution function includes a novel algorithm based on available bandwidth estimation. A prototype of our system was evaluated through experiments using real wireless environments and its efficiency is discussed.

The recent progress in sensor and wireless communication technologies has enabled the design and implementation of new applications such as sensor telemetry which is the use of wireless sensors to gather fine-grained information from products, people and places. In this work, we consider a realistic telemetry application in which an area is periodically monitored by a sensor network which gathers data from equally spaced sample points. The objective is to maximize the lifetime of the network by jointly selecting the sensing nodes, the node transmission powers and the route to the base station from each sensing node. We develop an optimization-based algorithm OPT-RE and a low complexity algorithm SP-RE for this purpose and analyze their dynamics through extensive numerical studies. Our results indicate that SP-RE is a promising algorithm which has comparable performance to that of the more computationally intensive OPT-RE algorithm. The energy consumption is significantly affected by the channel access method, and in this paper, we also compare the effects of the collision free TDMA and contention based CSMA/CA methods. We propose practical enhancements to CSMA/CA so that the energy consumption due to collisions is reduced. Our simulation results indicate that with the proposed enhancements contention based channel access can provide comparable performance to that of the collision free methods.

IEEE 802.11e Medium Access Control (MAC) is a supplement to the IEEE 802.11 Wireless Network (WLAN) standard to support Quality of Service (QoS). The 802.11e MAC defines a new coordination function, namely Hybrid Coordination Function (HCF), which takes the QoS requirements of flows into account and allocates Transmission Opportunity (TXOP) to stations. On the basis of mean sending rate, delay of Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic cannot be bounded with the reference HCF scheduling algorithm proposed in this supplement. In this paper, we propose a new Connection Admission Control (CAC) and a scheduling algorithm that utilize the token bucket and a modified Latency-Rate (LR) scheduling algorithm to guarantee a bounded delay for HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA). The new Service Interval (SI) is calculated to optimize the number of stations accommodated and takes into account delay bound and token bucket parameters. We show that it is possible to obtain worst-case performance guarantees on delay. First, we analyze the behavior of the new scheduler with a loss free wireless channel model and after this, with a burst loss model and we explain how it is possible to extend this scheduler for a multi-rate scheme. Properties of the proposal are investigated both theoretically and using ns-2 simulations. We present a set of simulations with both Constant Bit Rate (CBR) and VBR flows and performance comparisons with HCF scheduling algorithm. The results show that the delay upper bound can be achieved for a large range of networks load with bandwidth optimization.

The performance of a passive RFID system in a dense multi-reader environment is limited by both reader-to-reader interference and reader-to-tag interference. In this paper, we formulate a practical RFID system model which takes into account the non-linear demodulation of the tags and the transmission spectrum of the readers. Using this model, we derive a novel linear programming formulation to obtain the optimum communication probability of the readers for a given reader deployment scenario. We then propose two novel distributed interference avoidance algorithms based on the detect-and-abort principle for multi-channel readers which can effectively mitigate the reader-to-tag interference as well as the reader-to-reader interference. Computer simulations show that the proposed algorithms can improve the successful communication probability and fairness among readers in dense reader environments, compared with the conventional listen-before-talk algorithm.

This paper investigates two issues of cellular engineering for cellular systems enhanced with two-hop fixed relay nodes (FRNs): spectrum partitioning and relay positioning, under the assumption of frequency reuse distance being equal to one. A channel-dependent spectrum partitioning scheme is proposed. According to this scheme, the ensemble mean of signal-to-interference-ratio on respective sets of links are taken into account to determine the bandwidths assigned to links connecting base station (BS) and FRNs, those connecting FRNs and mobile terminals (MTs) and those connecting BS and MTs. The proper FRN positioning is formulated as a constraint optimization problem, which tries to maximize the mean user data rate while at the same time ensures in probability 95% users being better served than in conventional cellular systems without relaying. It is demonstrated with computer simulations that FRN positioning has a strong impact on system performance. In addition, when FRNs can communicate with BS over line-of-sight channels the FRN enhanced cellular system with our proposed spectrum partitioning can remarkably outperform that with a known channel-borrowing based scheme and the conventional cellular systems without relaying. Simulation results also show that with proper FRN positioning the proposed spectrum partitioning scheme is robust against the unreliability of links connecting BS and FRNs.

Turbo coded hybrid ARQ (HARQ) is known as one of the promising error control techniques for high speed wireless packet access. However, in a severe frequency-selective fading channel, the HARQ throughput performance significantly degrades for direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) system using rake combining. This problem can be overcome by replacing the rake combining by the frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion. In a system with the conventional FDE, the guard interval (GI) is inserted to avoid the inter-block interference (IBI). The insertion of GI reduces the throughput. Recently, overlap FDE that requires no GI insertion was proposed. In this paper, we apply overlap FDE to HARQ and derive the MMSE-FDE weight for packet combining. Then, we evaluate the throughput performance of DS-CDMA HARQ with overlap FDE. We show that overlap FDE provides better throughput performance than both the rake combining and conventional FDE regardless of the degree of the channel frequency-selectivity.

In a frequency-selective multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel, the optimum transmission is achieved by beamforming with eigenvectors obtained at each discrete frequency point, i.e., an extension of eigenbeam-space division multiplexing (E-SDM). However, the calculation load of eigenvalue decomposition at the transmitter increases in proportion to the number of frequency points. In addition, frequency-independent eigenvectors increase the delay spread of the effective channel observed at the receiver. In this paper, we propose a pseudo eigenvector scheme for the purpose of mitigating the calculation load and maintaining frequency continuity (or decreasing the delay spread). First, we demonstrate that pseudo eigenvectors reduce the delay spread of the effective channels with low computational complexity. Next, the practical performance of the pseudo E-SDM (PE-SDM) transmission is evaluated. The simulation results show that PE-SDM provides almost the same or better performance compared with E-SDM when the receiver employs a time-windowing-based channel estimation available in the low delay spread cases.

In this paper, an efficient cyclic prefix reconstruction (CPR) technique with turbo equalization is developed for multi-antenna single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) systems, which are for multi-input multi-output (MIMO), space-time block code (STBC), and space-frequency block code (SFBC) applications. The proposed method includes pre-processing estimation (PPE), weighted interblock interference cancellation (WIBIC), or residual intercarrier interference suppression (RICIS). PPE is employed to compute initial values of MIMO turbo equalization and the WIBIC is developed to cancel interblock interference (IBI) at the initial iteration of the CPR for STBC SC-FDE. RICIS is used to mitigate residual intercarrier interference (ICI) after each iteration of the CPR. By applying the proposed method to the multi-antenna SC-FDE system with insufficient cyclic prefix (CP), we can significantly improve its error performance, obtaining the benefits of spectral efficiency gain and multiplexing/diversity gain in MIMO/STBC/SFBC.

Intermittent periodic transmit (IPT forwarding) has been proposed as a highly efficient packet forwarding method for wireless multihop networks. With IPT forwarding, packets are intermittently transmitted by a source node and each relaying node forwards a relaying packet immediately after receiving it. The frequency reuse space attained by this scheme is proportional to the given transmit period and if the transmit period is adequately chosen, interference between adjoining nodes in transmission can be removed. The IPT forwarding evaluations conducted to date have assumed that the transmission conditions were ideal. However, actual conditions are clearly more complex. In this paper, we develop testbeds of wireless multihop node and study the feasibility of IPT forwarding in a large-scale building with 4 stories. Each node is equipped with 802.11b wireless interface in the Ad-Hoc mode and proprietary protocols for IPT forwarding that we developed for these experiments.

Optical wireless communications is a research topic of extreme interest since it offers high data rate (Gbps data rate), security, and RF interference immunity. However, optical wireless communications places severe restrictions on the communications paths; they must be direct beam connections. To increase the number of users and link robustness, optical wireless communications must be able to operate even when obstacles are placed between transmitters and receivers, so optical micro-cell (OMC) with autonomous beam control can overcome link robustness. In addition, OMC based optical wireless communication yields compact systems. This paper presents the design, an implementation, and a demonstration of a 114 Mbps autonomous beam control optical wireless communication system based on an OMC technique. The robust posture control results optimum downlink alignment and good eye diagram of data transmission.

This paper addresses the ambiguity of radar altimetry related to the statistical nature of the Earth's surface roughness. A hypothetic altimetry method, which provides a simple way to quantify the measures of ambiguity, is proposed. Cramer-Rao lower bounds on the variances of estimates for the mean altitude and root-mean-square height of the sea surface are suggested as such quantitative measures. The accuracy of some types of air- and spaceborne radar altimeters is numerically analyzed against the derived lower bounds.

This paper analyses the autocorrelation function of return waveforms in high precision radar altimeters employing chirp-pulse transmit signal under the condition of near-nadir deviations of the antenna boresight axis. It is shown that in case of ultra wideband transmit signals providing very high time resolution the correlation function can be approximated by a product of two separate functions of time.

This letter proposes an integrated authentication model for NGN to access the wired/wireless infrastructure. The existing authentication model based on port-based access control is not best suited for integrated network environments. The main focus of this paper is on developing a feasible authentication model using the authenticator positioned in the control function in the NGN.

A method is presented that can substantially reduce the memory requirements of non-binary turbo decoders by efficient representation of the extrinsic information. In the case of the duo-binary turbo decoder employed by the IEEE 802.16e standard, the extrinsic information memory can be reduced by about 43%, which decreases the total decoder complexity by 18%. We also show that the proposed algorithm can be implemented by simple hardware architecture.

Smart card-based key exchange in the three-party setting allows two users with smart cards to agree on a common session key with the help of the trusted server. In this letter, we propose an efficient three-party smart card-based key exchange scheme with explicit (or mutual) authentication which requires only three rounds. Our scheme is the most round-/communication-efficient smart card-based key exchange scheme among those found in the literature, while providing key independence, forward secrecy and security against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

In this study, a novel binary image authentication scheme is proposed, which can be used to detect any alteration of the host image. In the proposed scheme, the watermark is embedded into a host image using a Hamming-code-based embedding algorithm. A performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves both smaller distortion and lower false negative rates than the previous schemes.

Ziv-Lempel incremental parsing [1] is a fundamental algorithm for lossless data compression. There is a simple enumerative implementation [7] which preserves a duality between the encoder and the decoder. However, due to its compactness, the implementation when combined with a complete integer code, allows only an input sequence with a length consistent with the parsing boundaries. In this letter, we propose a simple additional mechanism for post-processing a binary file of arbitrary length, provided the file punctuation is externally managed.

The directional MAC protocols improve spatial reuse, but require the exact location of destination and have the problem of deafness. In this paper, we propose a dual-channel MAC protocol with directional antennas for mobile ad-hoc networks. In the proposed MAC protocol, RTS/CTS are sent omnidirectionally as nodes do not have the exact location of the destination in mobile environments. Omnidirectional transmissions on control channel overcome deafness, but have low spatial reuse. We propose a new blocking algorithm to improve spatial reuse on control channel. We use the negative CTS (NCTS) to solve the exposed terminal problem. We confirm throughput of the proposed MAC protocol by simulations using Qualnet ver. 3.8 simulator.

This study proposes a technique of lossless steganography for G.711, the most common codec for digital speech communications systems such as VoIP. The proposed technique exploits the characteristics of G.711 for embedding steganogram information without degradation. This paper shows the capacity of the proposed technique.

A novel low-complexity iterative receiver for coded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is proposed in this letter. The iterative receiver uses the parallel interference cancellation (PIC)-maximum ratio combining (MRC) detector for MIMO-OFDM detection, which is a popular alternative to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) detector due to its lower computational complexity. However, we have found that the conventional PIC-MRC detector tends to underestimate the magnitude of its output log likelihood ratios (LLRs). Based on this discovery, we propose to multiply these LLRs by a constant factor, which is optimized according to the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart of the soft-in soft-out (SISO) detector. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of the PIC-MRC-based receiver with little additional cost in computational complexity, allowing it to closely approach the performance of receiver using the much more complex MMSE detector.

The computational complexity of the optimum maximum likelihood detector (OMLD) does not allow its utility for multi-user detection (MUD) in code division multiple access (CDMA) systems. As proposed in this letter, particle swarm optimization (PSO) with soft decision offers a much more efficient option with few parameters to be adjusted, flexibility to implement, that gives a much faster convergence compared to OMLD. It outperforms the conventional detector, the genetic algorithm approach and the standard suboptimal detectors considered in the literature.

In this letter, we introduce a new adaptive beamforming assisted receiver based on minimizing the approximate negentropy (NEGMIN) of the estimation error. We consider the approximate negentropy by using a nonpolynomial expansion of the estimation error as a new performance criterion to improve the performance of adaptive beamforming receivers based on the minimizing minimum mean squared error (MMSE) criteria. Negentropy includes higher order statistical information and its minimization provides improved converge, performance, and accuracy compared to traditional methods such as MMSE in terms of bit error rate (BER).

In this letter, we derive an analytical expression for computing the symbol error probability (SEP) of the M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) in the joint presence of phase/quadrature error and I/Q gain imbalance over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The derived expression containing only the two-dimensional Gaussian Q-function can be used to compute the SEP of M-QAM in various fading channels by making use of the moment-generating function (MGF) approach.

In OFDMA systems, various subcarrier allocation (SA) algorithms have been developed and adopted to realize the low-cost implementation or the optimized usage of resources, such as bandwidth and total transmit power, at the cost of increased complexity. Regardless of SA algorithms, however, it is computationally inefficient for a user who uses only a small number of subcarriers to use a full fast Fourier transform (FFT) for multicarrier demodulation at a conventional receiver in a downlink environment. In response, this letter proposes a novel low complexity FFT scheme that demodulates a set of desired multicarriers with smaller-size FFTs is proposed for computationally efficient and/or low hardware-cost receiver in OFDMA systems. Furthermore, a decision rule for the optimum size of FFT in the known transform decomposition methods is provided.

Full-diversity transmission for space-time block codes (STBCs) with multiple transmit antennas can be achieved by using coordinate interleaved orthogonal designs (CIODs). To effectively evaluate the performance of CIODs, we derive union upper and lower bounds on the symbol-error rate (SER) and a corresponding asymptotic diversity order of symmetric structured CIOD, in particular, with two transmit antennas over quasi-static spatially uncorrelated/correlated frequency-nonselective Rayleigh fading channels. Some numerical results are provided to verify our analysis.

This letter deals with adaptive array beamforming based on a minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) technique with robust capabilities for code-division multiple access signals. It has been shown that the MVDR beamformer suffers from the drawback of being very sensitive to pointing error over the eigenspace-based beamformers. For the purpose of efficient estimation and calibration, a highly efficient approach has been proposed that is implemented on polynomial rooting rather than spectral searching. However, this rooting method is suboptimal in the presence of the noise and multiple access interference (MAI). In this letter, we propose an improved polynomial rooting calibration method that is robust in both of the low signal-to-noise ratio and large MAI scenarios. Several computer simulations are provided for illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This letter deals with multiuser detection under imprecise knowledge of the received signature codes of all active users for multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) systems. The weight vector of the modified multiple constrained minimum variance (MMCMV) is found by projecting the multiple constrained minimum variance (MCMV) weight vector onto a vector subspace constructed from the eigenstructure of the correlation matrix. However, MMCMV still cannot handle the large code-mismatch. Shaping the noise subspace with all estimated active spreading codes, we present an effective approach to achieve more robust capabilities than the MMCMV. Computer simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed detector.

A stacked rectangular microstrip antenna with a shorting plate is proposed as a car antenna for dual band (VICS and ETC) operation in the ITS. The proposed antenna has the proper radiation patterns for the VICS and ETC. The antenna is small in size and effective in dual band operation.

For simulating i.i.d. time-varying MIMO channels using multiple Jakes' rings, it is desirable to generate channels having stable statistics with fewer scatterers. The statistical property of the conventional Jakes' model may depend on the initial phase set assigned to scattering points. In this letter, we present simple and effective conditions on arrangement of scattering points to achieve stable fading properties. The results show that the proposed arrangement provides higher statistical stability in generating time-varying channels.

To evaluate whether electromagnetic disturbances that leak from PC displays contain information or not, we need to reconstruct the information from the measured disturbance. This requires a special receiver, and not all test houses have a special receiver. In this paper, we propose performing the evaluation with the spectrum analyzers commonly used for EMI measurement. First, we select a spectrum that containing the frequency component of the vertical sync signal using a spectrum analyzer (SA1). Then, we measure the video output of SA1 using another spectrum analyzer (SA2) and evaluate the disturbance from the frequency component of the horizontal sync signal.

We propose a new Multimedia-on-Demand (MoD) system which provides broadcast, batch and interactive services concurrently. An analytical model is derived for the performance evaluation of this MoD system. Numerical results show that with proper design the system can provide better system performance than some previously proposed MoD systems.

In this letter, we propose a novel approach to speech enhancement, which incorporates a new criterion based on residual noise shaping. In the proposed approach, our goal is to make the residual noise perceptually comfortable instead of making it less audible. A predetermined `comfort noise' is provided as a target for the spectral shaping. Based on some assumptions, the resulting spectral gain function turns out to be a slight modification of the Wiener filter while requiring very low computational complexity. Subjective listening test shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional spectral enhancement technique based on soft decision and the noise suppression implemented in IS-893 Selectable Mode Vocoder.

This letter introduces a simple way of estimating the integer frequency offset (IFO) of OFDM-based digital video broadcasting (DVB) systems. By modifying the conventional maximum likelihood (ML) estimator to include the multi-stage estimation strategy, the IFO estimator is derived. Simulations indicate that the proposed IFO estimator works robustly when compared to ML estimator.