This paper presents a downlink interference mitigation framework for two-tier heterogeneous networks, that consist of spectrum-sharing macrocells and femtocells*. This framework establishes cooperation between the two tiers through two algorithms, namely, the restricted waterfilling (RWF) algorithm and iterative reweighted least squares interference alignment (IRLS-IA) algorithm. The proposed framework models the macrocell-femtocell two-tier cellular system as an overlay cognitive radio system in which the macrocell system plays the role of the primary user (PU) while the femtocell networks play the role of the cognitive secondary users (SUs). Through the RWF algorithm, the macrocell basestation (MBS) cooperates with the femtocell basestations (FBSs) by releasing some of its eigenmodes to the FBSs to do their transmissions even if the traffic is heavy and the MBS's signal to noise power ratio (SNR) is high. Then, the FBSs are expected to achieve a near optimum sum rate through employing the IRLS-IA algorithm to mitigate both the co-tier and cross-tier interference at the femtocell users' (FUs) receivers. Simulation results show that the proposed IRLS-IA approach provides an improved sum rate for the femtocell users compared to the conventional IA techniques, such as the leakage minimization approach and the nuclear norm based rank constraint rank minimization approach. Additionally, the proposed framework involving both IRLS-IA and RWF algorithms provides an improved total system sum rate compared with the legacy approaches for the case of multiple femtocell networks.

In this article we present a novel corpus-based method for inducing romanization systems for languages through a bilingual alignment of transliteration word pairs. First, the word pairs are aligned using a non-parametric Bayesian approach, and then for each grapheme sequence to be romanized, a particular romanization is selected according to a user-specified criterion. As far as we are aware, this paper is the only one to describe a method for automatically deriving complete romanization systems. Unlike existing human-derived romanization systems, the proposed method is able to discover induced romanization systems tailored for specific purposes, for example, for use in data mining, or efficient user input methods. Our experiments study the romanization of four totally different languages: Russian, Japanese, Hindi and Myanmar. The first two languages already have standard romanization systems in regular use, Hindi has a large number of diverse systems, and Myanmar has no standard system for romanization. We compare our induced romanization system to existing systems for Russian and Japanese. We find that the systems so induced are almost identical to Russian, and 69% identical to Japanese. We applied our approach to the task of transliteration mining, and used Levenshtein distance as the romanization selection criterion. Our experiments show that our induced romanization system was able to match the performance of the human created system for Russian, and offer substantially improved mining performance for Japanese. We provide an analysis of the mechanism our approach uses to improve mining performance, and also analyse the differences in characteristics between the induced system for Japanese and the official Japanese Nihon-shiki system. In order to investigate the limits of our approach, we studied the romanization of Myanmar, a low-resource language with a large vocabulary of graphemes. We estimate the approximate corpus size required to effectively romanize the most frequency k graphemes in the language for all values of k up to 1800.

Underlay cognitive radio (CR) permits unlicensed secondary users (SUs) to transmit their own data over the licensed spectrum unless the interference from the SUs on the licensed primary user (PU) exceeds an acceptable level. This paper proposes two generalized interference alignment (IA)-based distributed optimization designs for multiple secondary transceivers in the underlay CR case with channel uncertainty under assumption that the actual channel error norm is below a certain bound. One of the designs is an extension to an existing method and the other one is a new design. In these methods, the precoding and power allocation matrices for each SU are either independently or jointly optimized for imperfect channel knowledge to maximize the secondary rates and to hold the secondary interference on the primary receiver under an acceptable limit that is determined by the primary receiver. Numerical results prove the ability of the proposed methods to support significant secondary rates provided that the PU is protected from extra interference from SUs, even in presence of channel uncertainty.

This paper focuses on the S-parameter method that is a basic method for measuring the input impedance of balanced-fed antennas. The basic concept of the method is summarized using the two-port network, and it is shown that the method can be enhanced to the unbalanced antennas using a formulation based on incident and reflected waves. The compensation method that eliminates the influence of a measurement jig and the application of the S-parameter method for the measurement of a radiation pattern with reduced unbalanced currents are explained. Further, application of the method for measuring the reflection and coupling coefficients of multiple antennas is introduced. The measured results of the input impedance of a dipole antenna, radiation patterns of a helical antenna on a small housing, and S-parameters of multiple antennas on a small housing are examined, and the measured results obtained with the S-parameter method are verified.

A coherent combining-based initial ranging scheme is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output and orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems. The proposed algorithm utilizes the correlation properties of the ranging codes to resolve the multipath components, coherently combines the initial ranging signal of resolved path on each receiving antenna to maximize the output signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio, and then collects the power of the multipath signals to detect the states of the ranging codes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has much better performance than the available noncoherent combining method, and can accommodate more active ranging users simultaneously in each cell.

This paper presents a $24 imes24$ MIMO channel sounder that has been developed based on a scalable fully parallel MIMO architecture. It can be flexibly configured with 3 sub-transmitters and 3 sub-receivers, each of which consists of 8 RF ports. This flexibility allows the measurement for both purposes of double directional and multi-link MIMO channel measurements. Implementation issues related to the multi-link operation on the fully parallel architecture were successfully solved by appropriate system design and applying several calibration techniques. The performance of the developed system was validated by extensive test experiments. Finally, a multi-link channel measurement example in an indoor environment was presented demonstrating the capability of the proposed system.

Smartphones have become vital devices in the current on-the-go Thai culture. Typically, virtual keyboards serve as tools for text input on smartphones. Due to the limited screen area and the large number of Thai characters, the size of each button on the keyboard is quite small. This leads to character mistyping and low typing speed. In this paper, we present a typical framework of a Thai Input Method on smartphones which includes four processes; Character Candidate Generation, Word Candidate Generation, Word Candidate Display, and Model Update. This framework not only works with Thai, it works with other letter-based languages as well. We also review virtual keyboards and techniques currently used and available for Thai text input.

This paper presents our project of designing EdgeWrite text entry methods for Japanese language. We are developing a version of EdgeWrite text entry method for Japanese language: Katakana EdgeWrite. Katakana EdgeWrite specifies the line stroke directions and writing order of the Japanese Katakana character. The ideal corner sequence pattern of EdgeWrite for each Katakana character is designed based on its line stroke directions and writing order.

Sensor noise prevents the exact measurement of output, which makes it difficult to guarantee the ultimate bound of the actual output and states, which is smaller than the sensor noise amplitude. Even worse, the time-varying delay in the input does not guarantee the boundedness of the actual output and states under sensor noise. In this letter, our considered system is a chain of integrators in which time-varying delay exists in the input and there is an additive form of sensor noise in the output measurement. To guarantee the arbitrarily small ultimate bound of the actual output and states, we newly propose an adaptive output feedback controller whose gain is tuned on-line. The merits of our control method over the existing results are clearly shown in the example.

In this paper, we consider decouple-and-forward (DCF) relaying, where the relay encodes and amplifies decoupled data using orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs), to achieve the maximum diversity gain of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. Since the channel status of all antennas is generally unknown and time-varying for cooperation in multi-antenna multiple-relay systems, we investigate an opportunistic relaying scheme for DCF relaying to harness distributed antennas and minimize the cooperation overheads by not using the global channel state information (CSI). In addition, for realistic wireless channels which have spatial fading correlation due to closely-spaced antenna configurations and poor scattering environments, we analyze the exact and lower bound on the symbol error probability (SEP) of the opportunistic DCF relaying over spatially correlated MIMO Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results show that, even in the presence of spatial fading correlation, the proposed opportunistic relaying scheme is efficient and achieves additional performance gain with low overhead.

With the scaling of CMOS technology into the nanometer regime, the overshooting effect is more and more obvious and has a significant influence to gate delay and power consumption. Recently, researchers have already proposed the overshooting effect models for an inverter. However, the accurate overshooting effect model for multiple-input gates is seldom presented and the existing technology to reduce a multiple-input gate to an inverter is not useful when modeling the overshooting effect for multiple-input gates. Therefore, modeling the overshooting effect for multiple-input gates is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a formula-based model is presented for the overshooting time of 2-input NOR gate. Then, more complicated methods are given to calculate the overshooting time of 3-input NOR gate and other multiple-input gates. The proposed model is verified to have a good agreement, within 3.4% error margin, compared with SPICE simulation results using CMOS 32nm PTM model.

In this letter, the orthogonal projection (OP) estimation of the direction of arrival (DOA) and direction of departure (DOD) of multiple targets for bistatic multiple-input multiple-output radars is addressed. First, a two-dimensional direction finding estimator based on OP technique with automatic pairing is developed. Second, this letter also presents a modified reduced-dimension estimator by utilizing the characteristic of Kronecker product, which only performs two one-dimensional angle estimates. Furthermore, the DOA and DOD pairing is given automatically. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the efficiency of the proposed estimators.

This paper presents a low complexity joint decoding scheme of block coded signals in an overloaded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. In previous literature, a joint maximum likelihood decoding scheme of block coded signals has been evaluated through theoretical analysis. The diversity gain with block coding prevents the performance degradation induced by signal multiplexing. However, the computational complexity of the joint decoding scheme increases exponentially with the number of multiplexed signal streams. Thus, this paper proposes a two step joint decoding scheme for block coded signals. The first step of the proposed scheme calculates metrics to reduce the number of the candidate codewords using decoding based on joint maximum likelihood symbol detection. The second step of the proposed scheme carries out joint decoding on the reduced candidate codewords. It is shown that the proposed scheme reduces the complexity by about 1/174 for 4 signal stream transmission.

A new digital controller for a single-phase boost power factor correction (PFC) converter operating at a discontinuous conduction mode (DCM), is presented to achieve high input power factor over wide input voltage and load range. A method of duty cycle modulation is proposed to reduce the line harmonic distortion and improve the power factor. The loop regulation scheme is adopted to further improve the system stability and the power factor simultaneously. Meanwhile, a novel digital pulse width modulator (DPWM) based on the delay lock loop technique, is realized to improve the regulation linearity of duty cycle and reduce the regulation deviation. The single-phase DCM boost PFC converter with the proposed digital controller based on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) has been implemented. Experimental results indicate that the proposed digital controller can achieve high power factor more than 0.99 over wide input voltage and load range, the output voltage deviation is less than 3V, and the peak conversion efficiency is 96.2% in the case of a full load.

In this paper, we propose a message passing decoding algorithm which lowers decoding error rates in the error floor regions for non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes transmitted over the binary erasure channel (BEC) and the memoryless binary-input output-symmetric (MBIOS) channels. In the case for the BEC, this decoding algorithm is a combination with belief propagation (BP) decoding and maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding on zigzag cycles, which cause decoding errors in the error floor region. We show that MAP decoding on the zigzag cycles is realized by means of a message passing algorithm. Moreover, we extend this decoding algorithm to the MBIOS channels. Simulation results demonstrate that the decoding error rates in the error floor regions by the proposed decoding algorithm are lower than those by the BP decoder.

In this paper, we study the impact of opportunistic user scheduling on the outage probability of cognitive radio (CR) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in the high power region where the peak transmit power constraint is higher than the peak interference constraint. The primary contributions of this paper are the derivation of exact closed-form expressions of the proposed scheduled CR-MIMO systems for outage probability and asymptotic analysis to quantify the diversity order and signal to noise ratio (SNR) gain. Through exact analytical results, we provide the achievable outage probability of the proposed scheduled systems as a function of SNR. Also, through asymptotic analysis, we show that the scheduled CR-MIMO systems provide some diversity order gain over the non-scheduled CR-MIMO systems which comes from multi-user diversity (MUD). Also, the SNR gain of the proposed scheduled systems is identical to that of the non-scheduled CR-MIMO systems.

We theoretically study the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) free-space optical (FSO) systems using subcarrier quadrature modulation (SC-QAM) signaling. The system average symbol-error rate (ASER) is derived taking into account the atmospheric turbulence effects on the MIMO/FSO channel, which is modeled by log-normal and the gamma-gamma distributions for weak and moderate-to-strong turbulence conditions. We quantitatively discuss the influence of index of refraction structure parameter, link distance, and different MIMO configurations on the system ASER. We also analytically derive and discuss the MIMO/FSO average (ergodic) channel capacity (ACC), which is expressed in terms of average spectral efficiency (ASE), under the impact of various channel conditions. Monte Carlo simulations are also performed to validate the mathematical analysis, and a good agreement between numerical and simulation results is confirmed.

This letter presents a scheme to improve the running time of exemplar-based image inpainting, first proposed by Criminisi et al. In the exemplar-based image inpainting, a patch that contains unknown pixels is compared to all the patches in the known region in order to find the best match. This is very time-consuming and hinders the practicality of Criminisi's method to be used in real time. We show that a simple bounding algorithm can significantly reduce number of distance calculations, and thus the running time. Performance of the bounding algorithm is affected by the order of patches that are compared, as well as the order of pixels in a patch. We present pixel and patch ordering schemes that improve the performance of bounding algorithms. Experiments with well-known images used in inpainting literature show that the proposed reordering scheme can reduce running time of the bounding algorithm up to 50%.

This paper proposes a novel heterodyne multiband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receiver with baseband automatic gain control (AGC) for cognitive radios. The proposed receiver uses heterodyne reception implemented with a wide-passband band-pass filter in the radio frequency (RF) stage to be able to receive signals in arbitrary frequency bands. Even when an RF Hilbert transformer is utilized in the receiver, image-band interference occurs due to the imperfection of the Hilbert transformer. In the receiver, analog baseband AGC is introduced to prevent the baseband signals exceeding the voltage reference of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). This paper proposes a novel technique to estimate the imperfection of the Hilbert transformer in the heterodyne multiband MIMO receiver with baseband AGC. The proposed technique estimates not only the imperfection of the Hilbert transformer but also the AGC gain ratio, and analog devices imperfection in the feedback loop, which enables to offset the imperfection of the Hilbert transformer. The performance of the proposed receiver is verified by using computer simulations. As a result, the required resolution of the ADC is 9 bits in the proposed receiver. Moreover, the proposed receiver has less computational complexity than that with the baseband interference cancellation unless a frequency band is changed every 9 packets or less.

We describe an In-Cell Projected Capacitive Touch Panel in a display using IGZO TFT technology. The prototype demonstrates high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and pen input operation. The possibility of enlarging the display size beyond current limits makes this a highly promising approach for In-Cell Capacitive touch panels.