The orthogonal array is an important object in combinatorial design theory, and it is applied to many fields, such as computer science, coding theory and cryptography etc. This paper mainly studies the existence of the mixed orthogonal arrays of strength two with seven factors and presents some new constructions. Consequently, a few new mixed orthogonal arrays are obtained.

In this work, we study efficient scheduling with network coding in a scalable video coding (SVC) multicast system. Transmission consists of two stages. The original SVC packets are multicasted by the server in the first stage and the lost packets are retransmitted in the second stage. With deadline constraint, the consumer can be only satisfied when the requested packets are received before expiration. Further, the hierarchical encoding architecture of SVC introduces extra decoding delay which poses a challenge for providing acceptable reconstructed video quality. To solve these problems, instantly decodable network coding is applied for reducing the decoding delay, and a novel packet weighted policy is designed to better describe the contribution a packet can make in upgrading the recovered video quality. Finally, an online packet scheduling algorithm based on the maximal weighted clique is proposed to improve the delay, deadline miss ratio and users' experience. Multiple characteristics of SVC packets, such as the packet utility, the slack time and the number of undelivered/wanted packets, are jointly considered. Simulation results prove that the proposed algorithm requires fewer retransmissions and achieves lower deadline miss ratio. Moreover, the algorithm enjoys fine recovery video quality and provides high user satisfaction.

For producing high quality synthesis, a concatenation-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) system usually requires a large number of segmental units to cover various acoustic-phonetic contexts. However, careful manual labeling and segmentation by human experts, which is still the most reliable way to prepare such units, is labor intensive. In this paper we adopt a two-step procedure to automate the labeling, segmentation and refinement process. In the first step, coarse segmentation of speech data is performed by aligning speech signals with the corresponding sequence of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Then in the second step, segment boundaries are refined with a proposed Context-Dependent Boundary Model (CDBM). Classification and Regression Tree (CART) is adopted to organize available data into a structured hierarchical tree, where acoustically similar boundaries are clustered together to train tied CDBM models for boundary refinement. Optimal CDBM parameters and training conditions are found through a series of experimental studies. Comparing with manual segmentation reference, segmentation accuracy (within a tolerance of 20 ms) is improved by the CDBMs from 78.1% (baseline) to 94.8% in Mandarin Chinese and from 81.4% to 92.7% in English, with about 1,000 manually segmented sentences used in training the models. To further reduce the amount of manual data for training CDBMs of a new speaker, we adapt a well-trained CDBM via efficient adaptation algorithms. With only 10-20 manually segmented sentences as adaptation data, the adapted CDBM achieves a segmentation accuracy of 90%.

LTE-Advanced heterogeneous networks (HetNets), consisting of conventional Macrocells overlaid by Picocells and forming a hierarchical cell structure, constitute an attractive way of improving the Macrocell capacity and coverage. However, the inter-tier interferences in such systems can significantly reduce the capacity and cause unacceptably high levels of control channel outage. Thus time domain Enhanced Inter-cell Interference Coordination (eICIC), such as almost blank subframe (ABS) and cell range expansion (CRE) techniques, has been proposed to mitigate the interference and improve the system capacity in HetNets. In order to acquire the benefit of eICIC technology efficiently, the three parameters, i.e. ABS ratio, ABS power and CRE bias, should be carefully configured jointly. Motivated by the above considerations, we first propose a single parameter optimization algorithm that fixes the other two parameters and then optimizes them separately. Then, a heuristic joint parameter optimization algorithm is proposed to maximize the system throughput. Extensive simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithms clearly outperform the fixed parameter configuration, and is close to that of the traversal search algorithm even though they have lower computation complexity

In the construction of a no-linear key-stream generator, self-shrinking is an established way of getting the binary pseudo-random periodic sequences in cryptography design. In this paper, using the theoretical analysis, we mainly study the self-shrinking sequence based on the l-sequence, and the theoretical results reflect its good cryptography properties accurately, such that it has the last period T = pe(p-1)/2 when T is an odd number, and the expected value of its autocorrelation belongs to {0,1/T and the variance is O(T/ln4T). Furthermore, we find that the 2-adic complexity of the self-shrinking sequence based on the l-sequence is large enough to resist the Rational Approximation attack.

We propose a new method of differential fault attack, which is based on the nibble-group differential diffusion property of the lightweight block cipher MIBS. On the basis of the statistical regularity of differential distribution of the S-box, we establish a statistical model and then analyze the relationship between the number of faults injections, the probability of attack success, and key recovering bits. Theoretically, time complexity of recovering the main key reduces to 22 when injecting 3 groups of faults (12 nibbles in total) in 30,31 and 32 rounds, which is the optimal condition. Furthermore, we calculate the expectation of the number of fault injection groups needed to recover 62 bits in main key, which is 3.87. Finally, experimental data verifies the correctness of the theoretical model.

Usually the contact voltage drop or contact resistance of electromagnetic relays is observed only to identify if the contacts are failure or not on the manufactures' life tests. However, it is difficult to reveal the contact performance degradation because the variation of contact resistance may not be obvious. In this paper, a new life test technology was investigated to analyze the contact failure mechanisms and degenerative processes of electromagnetic relays by measuring their time parameters including closing time, opening time, over-travel time, rebound duration and gap time during each operation. Moreover, for the purpose of verifying the time parameters, the contact motion and contact morphology during life test were record by using a high speed camera. Both the variations of time parameters and information obtained from photos taken by high speed camera show that it involves three different degenerative phases during the whole life of a relay. The results also indicate this method is an effective technology to discriminate and diagnose the failure mechanisms for electromagnetic relays.

The recommend system has been widely used in many web application areas such as e-commerce services. With the development of the recommend system, the HIN modeling method replaces the traditional bipartite graph modeling method to represent the recommend system. But several studies have already showed that recommend system is vulnerable to shilling attack (injecting attack). However, the effectiveness of how traditional shilling attack has rarely been studied directly in the HIN model. Moreover, no study has focused on how to enhance shilling attacks against HIN recommend system by using the high-level semantic information. This work analyzes the relationship between the high-level semantic information and the attacking effects in HIN recommend system. This work proves that attack results are proportional to the high-level semantic information. Therefore, we propose a heuristic attack method based on high-level semantic information, named Semantic Shilling Attack (SSA) on a HIN recommend system (HERec). This method injects a specific score into each selected item related to the target in semantics. It ensures transmitting the misleading information towards target items and normal users, and attempts to interfere with the effect of the recommend system. The experiment is dependent on two real-world datasets, and proves that the attacking effect is positively correlate with the number of meta-paths. The result shows that our method is more effective when compared with existing baseline algorithms.

Transmission coordination mechanism (TCM) aids opportunistic routing (OR) to reduce the total number of packet transmissions and improve end-to-end throughput. Existing paradigms based on batch map partitions packets of communication session into segments, and transmit packet segments in batch mode sequentially. However, the rate of successful transmission coordination oscillates due to the oscillation of the number of packets batch transmitted. In this paper, we propose batch sliding window-based TCM to improve the performance of OR. By transmitting packets in continuous batch mode, batch sliding window-based TCM can hold the rate of successful transmission coordination steady. Simulation results show the average end-to-end throughput gain of the proposed TCM is 15.4% over existing batch map-based TCM.

This paper studies the 2-adic complexity of the self-shrinking sequence under the relationship between 2-adic integers and binary sequences. Based on the linear complexity and the number of the sequences which have the same connection integer, we conclude that the 2-adic complexity of the self-shrinking sequence constructed by a binary m-sequence of order n has a lower bound 2n-2-1. Furthermore, it is shown that its 2-adic complexity has a bigger lower bound under some circumstances.

Electrical life is an important parameter to estimate the reliability of a relay, and it is greatly affected by load current. In order to shorten the time of life test, load current stress accelerated life tests were carried out by using a life test system designed for relay in this paper. During the life test, many parameters such as the contact resistance, the closing time and the over-travel time of relay were measured for each operation to identify the failure modes. After the life test, the failure mechanisms under each current stress, which cause the same failure mode, were analyzed by investigating the variations of parameters and observing the morphology of contact surface. In addition, for the purpose of further studying the consistency of failure mechanisms between different current stress, a Weibull statistical analysis was adopted to estimate the shape parameter of Weibull distribution because the same shape parameter means the same failure mechanism. Finally, a statistical model for estimating the lifetime under load current stress was built. The research methods and conclusions mentioned in this paper are meaningful to perform the accelerated life tests for other types of relays.