The search functionality is under construction.

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications

  • Impact Factor

    0.73

  • Eigenfactor

    0.002

  • article influence

    0.1

  • Cite Score

    1.6

Advance publication (published online immediately after acceptance)

Volume E99-B No.4  (Publication Date:2016/04/01)

    Special Section on Autonomous Decentralized Systems Technologies and Applications for Next-Generation Social Infrastructure
  • FOREWORD Open Access

    Kinji MORI  

     
    FOREWORD

      Page(s):
    777-777
  • Management and Technology Innovation in Rail Industry as Social Infrastructure for Improved Quality of Life Open Access

    Masaki OGATA  

     
    INVITED PAPER

      Page(s):
    778-785

    East Japan Railway Company has created new businesses such as life-style business and information technology business on the basis of railway business for sustainable growth. These businesses generate and provide synergy to one another effectively because each business is autonomous decentralized system based on diversified infrastructure. The infrastructure includes not just structure but management, technology, operation and maintenance: we call this “MTOMI Model.” The MTOMI Model is the key concept of JR East's businesses and can generate JR East's ecosystem.

  • Autonomous Decentralized Authorization and Authentication Management for Hierarchical Multi-Tenancy Open Access

    Qiong ZUO  Meiyi XIE  Wei-Tek TSAI  

     
    INVITED PAPER

      Page(s):
    786-793

    Hierarchical multi-tenancy, which enables tenants to be divided into subtenants, is a flexible and scalable architecture for representing subsets of users and application resources in the real world. However, the resource isolation and sharing relations for tenants with hierarchies are more complicated than those between tenants in the flat Multi-Tenancy Architecture. In this paper, a hierarchical tenant-based access control model based on Administrative Role-Based Access Control in Software-as-a-Service is proposed. Autonomous Areas and AA-tree are used to describe the autonomy and hierarchy of tenants, including their isolation and sharing relationships. AA is also used as an autonomous unit to create and deploy the access permissions for tenants. Autonomous decentralized authorization and authentication schemes for hierarchical multi-tenancy are given out to help different level tenants to customize efficient authority and authorization in large-scale SaaS systems.

  • Autonomous Decentralized Database System Self Configuration Technology for High Response

    Carlos PEREZ-LEGUIZAMO  

     
    PAPER

      Page(s):
    794-802

    In recent years, society has experienced several changes in its ways and methods of consuming. Nowadays, the diversity and the customization of products and services have provoked that the consumer needs continuously change. Hence, the database systems support e-business processes are required to be timeliness and adaptable to the changing preferences. Autonomous Decentralized Database System (ADDS), has been proposed in order to satisfy the enhanced requirements of current on-line e-business applications. Autonomy and decentralization of subsystems help to achieve short response times in highly competitive situations and an autonomous Coordination Mobile Agent (CMA) has been proposed to achieve flexibility in a highly dynamic environment. However, a problem in ADDS is as the number of sites increases, the distribution and harmonization of product information among the sites are turning difficult. Therefore, many users cannot be satisfied quickly. As a result, system timeliness is inadequate. To solve this problem, a self configuration technology is proposed. This technology can configure the system to the evolving situation dynamically for achieving high response. A simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed technology in a large-scale system. Finally, an implementation of this technology is presented.

  • Autonomous Decentralized Service Oriented Architecture Concept and Application for Mission Critical Information Systems

    Carlos PEREZ-LEGUIZAMO  P. Josue HERNANDEZ-TORRES  J.S. Guadalupe GODINEZ-BORJA  Victor TAPIA-TEC  

     
    PAPER

      Page(s):
    803-811

    Recently, the Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) have been recognized as the key to the integration and interoperability of different applications and systems that coexist in an organization. However, even though the use of SOA has increased, some applications are unable to use it. That is the case of mission critical information applications, whose requirements such as high reliability, non-stop operation, high flexibility and high performance are not satisfied by conventional SOA infrastructures. In this article we present a novel approach of combining SOA with Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ADS) in order to provide an infrastructure that can satisfy those requirements. We have named this infrastructure Autonomous Decentralized Service Oriented Architecture (ADSOA). We present the concept and architecture of ADSOA, as well as the Loosely Couple Delivery Transaction and Synchronization Technology for assuring the data consistency and high reliability of the application. Moreover, a real implementation and evaluation of the proposal in a mission critical information system, the Uniqueness Verifying Public Key Infrastructure (UV-PKI), is shown in order to prove its effectiveness.

  • Subscription Aggregation Query Processing Based on Matrix Summation over DTN

    Yefang CHEN  Zhipeng HUANG  Pei CAO  Ming JIN  Chengtou DU  Jiangbo QIAN  

     
    PAPER

      Page(s):
    812-819

    Some networks, such as wireless sensor networks, vehicle networks, etc., are often disconnected and thus fail to provide an end-to-end route for transmission. As a result, a new kind self-organized wireless network, i.e., Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is proposed to transmit messages using a store-carry-forward method. To efficiently process aggregation queries, this paper proposes a subscription aggregation query processing method that combines query processing and transfer protocols. The basic idea is reducing the number of redundant copy transmissions, increasing the message delivery rate and reducing the transmission delay by matrix summation. Theoretical and experimental results show that the method can attain a good performance in the delay tolerant networks.

  • Illegal Interrogation Detectable Products Distribution Scheme in RFID-Enabled Supply Chains

    Kentaroh TOYODA  Iwao SASASE  

     
    PAPER

      Page(s):
    820-829

    In RFID-enabled supply chains, it is necessary to protect the contents of EPCs (Electronic Product Code) since an EPC contains sensitive information such as the product code and serial number and could be used for counterfeits. Although many protection schemes have been proposed, no scheme can limit the number of illegal attempts for discovering EPCs or notice whether an attacker exists. In this paper, we propose an illegal interrogation detectable products distribution scheme for RFID-enabled supply chains. The idea is to detect the attacker by forcing him/her to access an authentication server. Our scheme masks EPCs with random sequences. Masked EPCs are written into genuine tags on products while random sequences are placed on an authentication server with an access code. An access code is divided into shares with a secret sharing scheme and they are written into genuine tags. We also write bogus shares into extra off-the-shelf tags that are not attached to any products. Since an attacker who wants to know genuine EPCs may obtain a large number of access code candidates and must try each on the authentication server, the server can detect the attacker.

  • Living Will for Resilient Structured Overlay Networks

    Kimihiro MIZUTANI  Takeru INOUE  Toru MANO  Osamu AKASHI  Satoshi MATSUURA  Kazutoshi FUJIKAWA  

     
    PAPER

      Page(s):
    830-840

    The routing efficiency of structured overlay networks depends on the consistency of pointers between nodes, where a pointer maps a node identifier to the corresponding address. This consistency can, however, break temporarily when some overlay nodes fail, since it takes time to repair the broken pointers in a distributed manner. Conventional solutions utilize “backpointers” to quickly discover any failure among the pointing nodes, which allow them to fix the pointers in a short time. Overlay nodes are, however, required to maintain backpointers for every pointing node, which incurs significant memory and consistency check overhead. This paper proposes a novel light-weight protocol; an overlay node gives a “living will” containing its acquaintances (backpointers) only to its successor, thus other nodes are freed from the need to maintain it. Our carefully-designed protocol guarantees that all acquaintances are registered via the living will, even in the presence of churn, and the successor notifies the acquaintances for the deceased. Even if the successor passes away and the living will is lost, the successor to the successor can identify the acquaintances with a high success ratio. Simulations show that our protocol greatly reduces memory overhead as well as the detection time for node failure with the cost being a slight increase in messaging load.

  • Max-Min-Degree Neural Network for Centralized-Decentralized Collaborative Computing

    Yiqiang SHENG  Jinlin WANG  Chaopeng LI  Weining QI  

     
    PAPER

      Page(s):
    841-848

    In this paper, we propose an undirected model of learning systems, named max-min-degree neural network, to realize centralized-decentralized collaborative computing. The basic idea of the proposal is a max-min-degree constraint which extends a k-degree constraint to improve the communication cost, where k is a user-defined degree of neurons. The max-min-degree constraint is defined such that the degree of each neuron lies between kmin and kmax. Accordingly, the Boltzmann machine is a special case of the proposal with kmin=kmax=n, where n is the full-connected degree of neurons. Evaluations show that the proposal is much better than a state-of-the-art model of deep learning systems with respect to the communication cost. The cost of the above improvement is slower convergent speed with respect to data size, but it does not matter in the case of big data processing.

  • Autonomous Decentralized Semantic-Based Architecture for Dynamic Content Classification

    Khalid MAHMOOD  Asif RAZA  Madan KRISHNAMURTHY  Hironao TAKAHASHI  

     
    PAPER

      Page(s):
    849-858

    The growing trends in Internet usage for data and knowledge sharing calls for dynamic classification of web contents, particularly at the edges of the Internet. Rather than considering Linked Data as an integral part of Big Data, we propose Autonomous Decentralized Semantic-based Content Classifier (ADSCC) for dynamic classification of unstructured web contents, using Linked Data and web metadata in Content Delivery Network (CDN). The proposed framework ensures efficient categorization of URLs (even overlapping categories) by dynamically mapping the changing user-defined categories to ontologies' category/classes. This dynamic classification is performed by the proposed system that mainly involves three main algorithms/modules: Dynamic Mapping algorithm, Autonomous coordination-based Inference algorithm, and Context-based disambiguation. Evaluation results show that the proposed system achieves (on average), the precision, recall and F-measure within the 93-97% range.

  • Time Synchronization Technique Using EPON for Next-Generation Power Grids

    Yuichi NAKAMURA  Andy HARVATH  Hiroaki NISHI  

     
    PAPER

      Page(s):
    859-866

    Changing attitudes toward energy security and energy conservation have led to the introduction of distributed power systems such as photovoltaic, gas-cogeneration, biomass, water, and wind power generators. The mass installation of distributed energy generators often causes instability in the voltage and frequency of the power grid. Moreover, the power quality of distributed power grids can become degraded when system faults or the activation of highly loaded machines cause rapid changes in power load. To avoid such problems and maintain an acceptable power quality, it is important to detect the source of these rapid changes. To address these issues, next-generation power grids that can detect the fault location have been proposed. Fault location demands accurate time synchronization. Conventional techniques use the Global Positioning System (GPS) and/or IEEE 1588v2 for time synchronization. However, both methods have drawbacks — GPS cannot be used in indoor situations, and the installation cost of IEEE 1588v2 devices is high. In this paper, a time synchronization technique using the broadcast function of an Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) system is proposed. Experiments show that the proposed technique is low-cost and useful for smart grid applications that use time synchronization in EPON-based next-generation power grids.

  • Regular Section
  • Demonstration of Bit-Level CWDM-Based Power Budget Extender Providing a High-Power Gain of 54dB in Symmetric-Rate 10G-EPON System

    Kwangok KIM  Hwanseok CHUNG  Younseon JANG  

     
    PAPER-Fiber-Optic Transmission for Communications

      Page(s):
    867-874

    We propose the cost-effective bit-level coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM)-based power budget extender (PBEx) that can provide a high link budget of 54dB in a symmetric-rate 10-Gbit/s Ethernet passive optical network (10/10G-EPON). The proposed CWDM-based PBEx comprises a 2R-based 10/10G-EPON central office terminal (COT) and 3R-based 10/10G-EPON remote terminal (RT). It can apply several conventional CWDM technologies at the feeder fiber to reduce the amount of optical fiber required and increase the link capacity. Thus, it mainly conducts a wavelength conversion and signal retiming, as well as an upstream burst-mode for a continuous-mode conversion. We experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of a CWDM-based PBEx through packet-level testing using a pre-commercialized 10/10G-EPON system. We can confirm that the proposed solution can support a 128-way split at a distance of over 40km per CWDM channel with an enlarged loss budget of 54dB. We can also satisfy loss-free service during a packet transmission of 1010 both downstream and upstream.

  • A Fast Hierarchical Arbitration in Optical Network-on-Chip Based on Multi-Level Priority QoS

    Jie JIAN  Mingche LAI  Liquan XIAO  

     
    PAPER-Fiber-Optic Transmission for Communications

      Page(s):
    875-884

    With the development of silicon-based Nano-photonics, Optical Network on Chip (ONoC) is, due to its high bandwidth and low latency, becoming an important choice for future multi-core networks. As a key ONoC technology, the arbitration scheme should provide differential arbitration service with high throughput and low latency for various types and priorities of traffic in CMPs. In this work, we propose a fast hierarchical arbitration scheme based on multi-level priority QoS. First, given multi-priority data buffer queue, arbiters provide differential transmissions with fair service for all nodes and guarantee the max-transmit-delay and min-communication-bandwidth for all queues. Second, arbiter adopts the transmit bound resource reservation scheme to reserve time slots for all nodes fairly, thereby achieving a throughput of 100%. Third, we propose fast arbitration with a layout of fast optical arbitration channels (FOACs) to reduce the arbitration period, thereby reducing packet transmitting delay. Simulation results show that with our hierarchical arbitration scheme, all nodes are allocated almost equal service access probability under various traffic patterns; thus, the min-communication-bandwidth and max-transmit-delay is guaranteed to be 5% and 80 cycles, respectively, under the overload demands. This scheme improves throughput by 17% compared to FeatherWeight under a self-similar traffic pattern and decreases arbitration delay by 15% compare to 2-pass arbitration, incurring a total power overhead of 5%.

  • Placement of Virtual Storages for Distributed Robust Cloud Storage

    Yuya TARUTANI  Yuichi OHSITA  Masayuki MURATA  

     
    PAPER-Network Management/Operation

      Page(s):
    885-893

    Cloud storage has become popular and is being used to hold important data. As a result, availability to become important; cloud storage providers should allow users to upload or download data even if some part of the system has failed. In this paper, we discuss distributed cloud storage that is robust against failures. In distributed cloud storage, multiple replicas of each data chunk are stored in the virtual storage at geographically different locations. Thus, even if one of the virtual storage systems becomes unavailable, users can access the data chunk from another virtual storage system. In distributed cloud storage, the placement of the virtual storage system is important; if the placement of the virtual cloud storage system means that a large number of virtual storages are possible could become unavailable from a failure, a large number of replicas of each data chunk should be prepared to maintain availability. In this paper, we propose a virtual storage placement method that assures availability with a small number of replicas. We evaluated our method by comparing it with three other methods. The evaluation shows that our method can maintain availability while requiring only with 60% of the network costs required by the compared methods.

  • A Design of Vehicular GPS and LTE Antenna Considering Vehicular Body Effects

    Patchaikani SINDHUJA  Yoshihiko KUWAHARA  Kiyotaka KUMAKI  Yoshiyuki HIRAMATSU  

     
    PAPER-Antennas and Propagation

      Page(s):
    894-904

    In this paper, a vehicular antenna design scheme that considers vehicular body effects is proposed. A wire antenna for the global positioning system (GPS) and long-term evolution (LTE) systems is implemented on a plastic plate and then mounted on a windshield of the vehicle. Common outputs are used to allow feed sharing. It is necessary to increase the GPS right-hand circularly polarization (RHCP) gain near the zenith and to reduce the axis ratio (AR). For LTE, we need to increase the horizontal polarization (HP) gain. In addition, for LTE, multiband characteristics are required. In order to achieve the specified performance, the antenna shape is optimized via a Pareto genetic algorithm (PGA). When an antenna is mounted on the body, antenna performance changes significantly. To evaluate the performance of an antenna with complex shape mounted on a windshield, a commercial electromagnetic simulator (Ansoft HFSS) is used. To apply electromagnetic results output by HFSS to the PGA algorithm operating in the MATLAB environment, a MATLAB-to-HFSS linking program via Visual BASIC (VB) script was used. It is difficult to carry out the electromagnetic analysis on the entire body because of the limitations of the calculating load and memory size. To overcome these limitations, we consider only that part of the vehicle's body that influences antenna performance. We show that a series of optimization steps can minimize the degradation caused by the vehicle`s body. The simulation results clearly show that it is well optimized at 1.575GHz for GPS, and 0.74 ∼ 0.79GHz and 2.11 ∼ 2.16GHz for LTE, respectively.

  • Experimental Study on Battery-Less Sensor Network Activated by Multi-Point Wireless Energy Transmission

    Daiki MAEHARA  Gia Khanh TRAN  Kei SAKAGUCHI  Kiyomichi ARAKI  

     
    PAPER-Wireless Communication Technologies

      Page(s):
    905-916

    This paper empirically validates battery-less sensor activation via wireless energy transmission to release sensors from wires and batteries. To seamlessly extend the coverage and activate sensor nodes distributed in any indoor environment, we proposed multi-point wireless energy transmission with carrier shift diversity. In this scheme, multiple transmitters are employed to compensate path-loss attenuation and orthogonal frequencies are allocated to the multiple transmitters to avoid the destructive interference that occurs when the same frequency is used by all transmitters. In our previous works, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme was validated theoretically and also empirically by using just a spectrum analyzer to measure the received power. In this paper, we develop low-energy battery-less sensor nodes whose consumed power and required received power for activation are respectively 142µW and 400µW. In addition, we conduct indoor experiments in which the received power and activation of battery-less sensor node are simultaneously observed by using the developed battery-less sensor node and a spectrum analyzer. The results show that the coverage of single-point and multi-point wireless energy transmission without carrier shift diversity are, respectively, 84.4% and 83.7%, while the coverage of the proposed scheme is 100%. It can be concluded that the effectiveness of the proposed scheme can be verified by our experiments using real battery-less sensor nodes.

  • Diamond Cellular Network —Optimal Combination of Small Power Basestations and CoMP Cellular Networks —

    Hidekazu SHIMODAIRA  Gia Khanh TRAN  Kei SAKAGUCHI  Kiyomichi ARAKI  Shinobu NANBA  Satoshi KONISHI  

     
    PAPER-Wireless Communication Technologies

      Page(s):
    917-927

    Coordinated Multi-point (CoMP) transmission has long been known for its ability to improve cell edge throughput. However, in a CoMP cellular network, fixed CoMP clustering results in cluster edges where system performance degrades due to non-coordinated clusters. To solve this problem, conventional studies proposed dynamic clustering schemes. However, such schemes require a complex backhaul topology and are infeasible with current network technologies. In this paper, small power base stations (BSs) are introduced instead of dynamic clustering to solve the cluster edge problem in CoMP cellular networks. This new cell topology is called the diamond cellular network since the resultant cell structure looks like a diamond pattern. In our novel cell topology, we derive the optimal locations of small power base stations and the optimal resource allocation between the CoMP base station and small power base stations to maximize the proportional fair utility function. By using the proposed architecture, in the case of perfect user scheduling, a more than 150% improvement in 5% outage throughput is achieved, and in the case of successive proportional fair user scheduling, nearly 100% improvement of 5% outage throughput is achieved compared with conventional single cell networks.

  • A Study on Dynamic Clustering for Large-Scale Multi-User MIMO Distributed Antenna Systems with Spatial Correlation

    Ou ZHAO  Hidekazu MURATA  

     
    PAPER-Wireless Communication Technologies

      Page(s):
    928-938

    Distributed antenna systems (DASs) combined with multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) transmission techniques have recently attracted significant attention. To establish MU-MIMO DASs that have wide service areas, the use of a dynamic clustering scheme (CS) is necessary to reduce computation in precoding. In the present study, we propose a simple method for dynamic clustering to establish a single cell large-scale MU-MIMO DAS and investigate its performance. We also compare the characteristics of the proposal to those of other schemes such as exhaustive search, traditional location-based adaptive CS, and improved norm-based CS in terms of sum rate improvement. Additionally, to make our results more universal, we further introduce spatial correlation to the considered system. Computer simulation results indicate that the proposed CS for the considered system provides better performance than the existing schemes and can achieve a sum rate close to that of exhaustive search but at a lower computational cost.

  • Impact of Hidden Nodes on On-Demand AP Wake-Up Exploiting WLAN Signals

    Yuma ASADA  Hiroyuki YOMO  

     
    PAPER-Terrestrial Wireless Communication/Broadcasting Technologies

      Page(s):
    939-950

    This paper investigates the impact of hidden nodes (HNs) on on-demand access point (AP) wake-up that is employed to realize energy-efficient wireless LANs (WLANs). The considered wake-up signaling exploits IEEE 802.11 signals transmitted by a WLAN station (STA) to remotely activate a sleeping AP: a STA with communication demands transmits a series of WLAN frames with their length corresponding to the wake-up ID. A wake-up receiver attached to each AP detects the length of WLAN frames with the low-power operations of envelope detection and on-off-keying (OOK) demodulation. Since WLAN frames constituting a wake-up signal are transmitted by a STA following carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) protocol, they are vulnerable to the well-known hidden node (HN) problem. The impact of HNs on wake-up signaling is different from that on data communications since the wake-up receiver employs unconventional frame length detection to extract the information on the wake-up ID from the received signal. In this paper, we first investigate the impact of HNs on wake-up failure probability with theoretical and experimental evaluations. If the degradation of wake-up signalling due to HNs is observed for a STA, the corresponding STA may suffer from collisions due to the same HNs for its data communications even if it manages to succeed in the wake-up process. In this case, the wake-up operation itself may not be necessary. Therefore, we also compare the impact of HNs on wake-up signaling and that on data communications after the wake-up process. These results and discussions provide us with an insight on the impact of HNs on on-demand AP wake-up exploiting WLAN signals.

  • Performance Analysis of Lunar Spacecraft Navigation Based on Inter-Satellite Link Annular Beam Antenna

    Lei CHEN  Ke ZHANG  Yangbo HUANG  Zhe LIU  Gang OU  

     
    PAPER-Navigation, Guidance and Control Systems

      Pubricized:
    2016/01/29
      Page(s):
    951-959

    The rapid development of a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) has raised the demand for spacecraft navigation, particularly for lunar spacecraft (LS). First, instead of the traditional approach of combining the united X-band system (UXB) with very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) by a terrestrial-based observing station in Chinese deep-space exploration, the spacecraft navigation based on inter-satellite link (ISL) is proposed because the spatial coverage of the GNSS downstream signals is too narrow to be used for LS navigation. Second, the feasibility of LS navigation by using ISL wide beam signals has been analyzed with the following receiving parameters: the geometrical dilution of precision (GDOP) and the carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N0) for satellites autonomously navigation of ISL and LS respectively; the weighting distance root-mean-square (wdrms) for the combination of both navigation modes. Third, to be different from all existing spacecraft ISL and GNSS navigation methods, an ISL annular beam transmitting antenna has been simulated to minimize the wdrms (1.138m) to obtain the optimal beam coverage: 16°-47° on elevation angle. Theoretical calculations and simulations have demonstrated that both ISL autonomous navigation and LS navigation can be satisfied at the same time. Furthermore, an onboard annular wide beam ISL antenna with optimized parameters has been designed to provide a larger channel capacity with a simpler structure than that of the existing GPS ISL spot beam antenna, a better anti-jamming performance than that of the former GPS ISL UHF-band wide band antenna, and a wider effectively operating area than the traditional terrestrial-based measurement. Lastly, the possibility and availability of applying an ISL receiver with an annular wide beam antenna on the Chinese Chang'E-5T (CE-5T) reentry experiment for autonomous navigation are analyzed and verified by simulating and comparing the ISL receiver with the practiced GNSS receiver.