A planar composite right/left-handed leaky wave antenna which operates at W-band is fabricated and its backward to forward beam scanning operation including broadside direction is confirmed experimentally. The scanning angle from 61 to 114 degrees with a frequency scanning range of 76 to 79 GHz is achieved.

A three-parallel thin-film waveguide is analyzed numerically, using mode-matching method that matches the boundary conditions in the sense of least squares. The precise numerical results of the dispersion relations and field distributions are presented for the lowest three hybrid modes.

New strip arrangements for high Q or high effective permittivity are proposed for artificial dielectric resonators in a waveguide. The quality factor and the effective permittivity are discussed by changing strip arrangement composing the artificial dielectric. Concentrating strips from both sides to the middle in the waveguide leads to increase of unloaded Q. The value becomes high to several thousands by decreasing dielectric loss of the material. Interdigital strip arrangement makes the effective permittivity very high. A resonator of the strip arrangement has effective permittivity over 800 and unloaded Q over 1000. Moreover the resonator exhibits a good spurious characteristic with no unnecessary resonant mode throughout several harmonics range.

We propose 3-hop cooperative diversity using QOSTBC (Quasi-Orthogonal Space-Time Block Code), which offers 3-hop cooperative diversity without signal separation in relay nodes. The key of our proposed scheme is encoding signal sequence in different signal unit according to relay stage. This letter explains details of the proposed scheme and shows that it offers interference reduction among streams and space diversity gain by result of simulations.

This paper discusses a generalized concept of multiple-symbol differential detection (MDD) and analytically derives weight parameters based on channel prediction for MDD on fast time-varying channels. At first, this paper shows that adaptive maximum-likelihood sequence estimation employing per-survivor processing (PSP-MLSE) with a single channel tap is similar concept to MDD. Next, the weight parameters for MDD are derived according to the channel estimation of PSP-MLSE based on a high order channel prediction. Finally, computer simulation confirms that MDD with the analytically derived parameters mitigates floor of bit error rate (BER) on fast time-varying fading channels without channel state information.

Five channel optical waveguides are investigated numerically by using mode-matching method. The precise numerical results of the dispersion relations near the cutoff and the field distributions are presented for the lowest five HE modes. When the geometric parameters of the waveguides can be optimized so as to satisfy the phase-matching condition, it is shown that the five channel optical waveguides operate as power divider.

For multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) spatial multiplexing, signal separation/detection is one of the most important signal processing parts, so that signal separation/detection schemes are being vigorously researched. As a promising signal separation/detection scheme, frequency-domain iterative soft interference cancellation (FD-SIC) has been proposed. Although iterative FD-SIC can provide the transmission performance close to lower bound for QPSK, the accuracy of signal separation/detection significantly degrades in case of high level data modulation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose layered soft interference cancellation (LSIC). We consider single-carrier (SC)-MIMO spatial multiplexing with frequency domain equalization (FDE). The achievable frame error rate (FER) performances with LSIC are evaluated by computer simulation to show that LSIC can provide better FER performance than iterative FD-SIC.

This paper proposes list Viterbi equalizers (LVEs) that use two kinds of metric criteria for wide-spread time-dispersive channels to achieve a good trade-off between complexity and bit error rate (BER) performance. For Viterbi equalization employing a state-reduction algorithm, the modified metric criterion proposed by Ungerboeck is not always equivalent to the squared Euclidean distance metric criterion. This paper proposes the following two schemes for the LVE: (1) to combine two kinds of metric criteria like combining diversity; (2) to select the metric criterion like selection diversity according to the channel impulse response. Finally, computer simulation shows that the proposed schemes improve BER performance on wide-spread frequency selective fading channels, even if the proposed schemes have smaller complexity than the conventional one.

In this paper, effects of the parasite elements on an antenna impedance of a UHF RFID tag put on a high impedance surface (HIS) are experimentally studied in detail. It is shown that small parasite elements on a mushroom HIS structure can help to recover a mismatch of the impedance and this impedance recovery is brought by an in-phase frequency shift of the HIS due to a mutual coupling between the HIS and the parasite elements. The technique is applied to a commercial 953 MHz band RFID tag inlet antenna on a 53-cell HIS with the total dimension of 125751.5 mm3 and it is demonstrated that the impedance mismatch is successfully recovered and the tag operates with a reading range of 3 m even on a 2003002 mm3 aluminum plate.

The dielectric rod waveguides with corrugation consisting of nonintegral-ratio period waves are investigated numerically. The leakage characteristics of HE11-type wave in the waveguide is analyzed by applying Yasuura's method. The complex propagation constants and the far field patterns are presented. The radiation pattern of a fabricated waveguide with corrugation agrees well with the calculated value. The dependence of radiation characteristics on the corrugation form is discussed. It is shown that the leakage directions and the intensity of leaky waves are controlled independently one another. The radiation pattern can be synthesized by choosing the geometric parameters of the corrugation properly.

This paper proposes a survivor-correction Viterbi algorithm (SCVA) and presents its application to an iterative sequence estimation in order to improve bit error rate performance of decision-feedback sequence estimation (DFSE) in the presence of intersymbol interference. The SCVA can mitigate erroneous survivor selections due to DFSE, because it modifies the add-compare-select operation to an add-correct-compare-select operation. Finally, it is confirmed by computer simulation that complexity of the proposed scheme is independent of delay of the main delayed ray and its performance is superior to that of DFSE at the same number of states.

Unloaded Q of an image-type dielectric resonator is studied with the simulation and experiment. It is shown that a gap between the dielectric resonator and the shield case reduces both the dielectric loss and conductor loss. The gap moves the electric and magnetic field distributions in the different directions, so that the two losses are reduced. A half-cut image-type resonator with a dielectric spacer inserted into the gap is measured to verify the concept. The unloaded Q is improved by about two times from that without a gap. The proposed structure gives a new packaging method of a dielectric resonator.

The radiation patterns are synthesized by properly disposing surface variations on dielectric rod waveguides. The genetic algorithm (GA) is applied for searching the optimum disposition of variation sections. A very fast calculation method used in the optimization is presented. The guided waves are related in the form of a 2-port circuit and the radiation field is expressed by superposition of the waves from variation sections. Various conical beams can be synthesized. Short variation sections and combination of several variation sections with different height are used to improve the synthesis performance. The ripple of the mainlobe and the sidelobe levels become small. Spherical sector patterns with a steep fall are synthesized and the agreement with the experimental values is confirmed.

In the field of computer vision the detection of edges in an image serves to simplify the date in the early stages, into a form which is more easily processed by the computer. But because of noise or due to the inherent weaknesses of the chosen edge detector, gaps or interruptions in the edges may be formed. In order for further processing to proceed with accuracy and confidence, these gaps must be filled or linked to form a more continuous edge. Proposed in this paper is a unique method of edge linking. This method consists of three steps, labelling, linking and merging. The procedure makes use of global information in the labelling process and local information with the use of templates in the linking and merging processes. As a result of the unique way in which the gaps between edge segments are filled, distortion of the edge image is kept minimal. One other advantage of the proposed edge linker is that it can be used in combination with different edge detection schemes. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, comparisons are given. These include the linear feature extraction method of Zhou et.al., upon which the proposed method is based and also outputs from a method described by Nevatia.

This paper proposes a multiple open-loop frequency estimation scheme based on differential detection for M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK), which accomplishes fast initial acquisition, precise frequency estimation and wide frequency coverage at the same time. The proposed scheme, which has a good trade-off between complexity and performance, operates as follows: 1) it consists of several frequency error detectors (FEDs) based on differential detection with different delays; 2) it precisely estimates frequency in a wide range (the same range of one symbol differential detection) by open-loop according to frequency errors detected by the FEDs. For real-time symbol-by-symbol operation in order to track fast time-varying frequency, it has a smaller complexity than the other frequency estimation schemes. It is confirmed by analysis, numerical calculation and computer simulation that the frequency estimation error of the proposed scheme is close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) (asymptotic degradation of the proposed scheme from the CRLB is about 0. 5 dB) while keeping a wide frequency coverage and this scheme can track fast time-varying frequency.

This paper proposes a phase-rotating phase-shift keying (PSK) modulation and shows that its narrow-band version is suitable for Viterbi equalization. The proposed PSK has the following features: 1) a spectrum shaping of the transmit/receive filters does not need to be restricted to the Nyquist criterion; 2) the transmitted data sequence is rotated for every symbol in order to reduce noise-correlation at the receiver. First, this paper discusses a performance degradation of bit error rate of Viterbi equalizers in the presence of the sampling timing offset or under time-dispersive frequency selective fading. Next, computer simulation confirms that π/2-shifted binary PSK with narrow-band spectrum shaping filter, which includes offset QPSK for its special case, solves the above mentioned performance degradation, keeping good spectrum efficiency equal to M-ary PSK.

This paper proposes performance improvement schemes for non-coherent multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems employing per transmit antenna differential mapping (PADM). PADM is one form of differential space-time coding (DSTC), which generates an independent differentially encoded sequence for each of the multiple transmit antennas by means of space-time coding and mapping. The features of the proposed schemes are as follows: 1) it employs an asymmetric space-time mapping instead of the conventional symmetric space-time mapping in order to lower the required signal to noise power ratio (SNR) for maintaining the bit error rate (BER) performance; 2) it employs an analytically derived branch metric criterion based on channel prediction for per-survivor processing (PSP) in order to track fast time-varying channels. Finally, computer simulation results confirm that the proposed schemes improve the required SNR by around 1dB and can track at the maximum Doppler frequency normalized by symbol rate of 5%.

This paper proposes an adaptive list-output Viterbi equalizer (LVE) with fast compare-select operation, in order to achieve a good trade-off between bit error rate (BER) performance and processing speed. An LVE, which keeps several survivors for each state, has good BER performance in the presence of wide-spread intersymbol interference. However, the LVE suffers from large processing delay due to its sorting-based compare-select operation. The proposed adaptive LVE greatly reduces its processing delay, because it simplifies compare-select operation. In addition, computer simulation shows that the proposed LVE causes only slight BER performance degradation due to its simplification of compare-select operation. Thus, the proposed LVE achieves better BER performance than decision-feedback sequence estimation (DFSE) without an increase in processing delay.

A novel two-dimensional (2D) beam scanning antenna array using composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) is proposed. The antenna array consists of a set of CRLH LWAs and a Butler matrix (BM) feeding network. The direction of the beam can be scanned two-dimensionally in one plane by changing frequency and in the other plane by switching the input ports of the BM. A four-element antenna array in the microstrip line configuration operating at 10.5 GHz is designed with the assistance of full-wave simulations based on the method of moment (MoM) and the finite-element method (FEM). The antenna array is fabricated and radiation characteristics are measured. The wide range 2D beam scanning operation with the angle from -30 deg to +25 deg in one plane by sweeping frequency from 10.25 GHz to 10.7 GHz and with four discrete angles of -46 deg, -15 deg, +10 deg, and +35 deg in the other plane by switching the input port is achieved.

A novel planar composite right/left handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) with double-sided metal patterns, which is advantageous in high scalability and low-cost fabrication, is proposed. Fundamental characteristics of the unbalanced and balanced CRLH TLs are confirmed numerically and theoretically both by full-wave finite-element method (FEM) simulations and the equivalent circuit analysis in terms of dispersion characteristics and characteristic impedances for the periodic structure. It is also shown that the relations between the left-handed circuit parameters and the geometrical parameters of the unit cell are simple and intuitive, which is useful for designing the CRLH TL. Experiments on 10-cell unbalanced and balanced CRLH TLs are carried out and the left-handed and right-handed wave propagations are confirmed by scattering parameter and near field measurements.