The thin film organic photovoltaic cells (OPVs) using organic semiconductors are inferior to oxgen-resistance and water-resistance, and the OPVs have a drawback that the photoelectric conversion efficiency (η) is low. For high efficiency of the OPVs, control of bulk heterojunction (BHJ) structure in the active layer is demanded. Therefore, it is thought that we can control the BHJ structure easily if we can bring a change in the aggregated structure and the crystallinity of the BHJ structure by introducing the third component that is different from the organic semiconductor into the activity layer. In this study, we introduced peptide consisting of phenylalanine of 2 molecules into the active layer prepared by poor solvent addition effect for the organic thin film solar cells and intended to try high efficiency of the organic thin film solar cells and examined the electrochemistry characteristic of the cells.

This paper derives highly accurate and effective closed-form formulas for the average upper bound on the pairwise error probability (PEP) of the multi-carrier index keying orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MCIK-OFDM) system with low-complexity detection (i.e., greedy detection) in two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading channels. To be specific, we utilize an exact moment generating function (MGF) of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) under TWDP fading to guarantee highly precise investigations of error probability performance; existing formulas for average PEP employ the approximate probability density function (PDF) of the SNR for TWDP fading, thereby inducing inherent approximation error. Moreover, some special cases of TWDP fading are also considered. To quantitatively reveal the achievable modulation gain and diversity order, we further derive asymptotic formulas for the upper bound on the average PEP. The obtained asymptotic expressions can be used to rapidly estimate the achievable error performance of MCIK-OFDM with the greedy detection over TWDP fading in high SNR regimes.

A digital image is often deteriorated by impulse noise that may occur during processes such as transmission. An impulse noise converts the pixel data in the image into black (0) or white (255) values at a random frequency and is also called salt-and-pepper noise. In this paper, we identify the details of pixels that have been damaged by impulse noise by analyzing the frequency of the noisy image using non-harmonic analysis (NHA). From experimental results, we can confirm that this method shows superior performance compared to the recent PSNR denoising method. In addition, we show that the proposed method is particularly superior in eliminating impulse noise in images with high noise rates.

To improve TCP throughput even if the maximum receiving window size is small, a TCP performance enhancing proxy (PEP) using a UDP-like packet sending policy with error control has been proposed. The PEP operates on a router along a TCP connection. When the PEP receives a data packet from the source host, it transmits the packet to the destination host, copies the packet into the local buffer (PEP buffer) in case the packets need to be transmitted and sends a premature ACK acknowledging receipt of the packet to the source host. In the PEP, the number of prematurely acknowledged packets in the PEP buffer is limited to a fixed threshold (watermark) value to avoid network congestion. Although the watermark value should be adjusted to changes in the network conditions, watermark adjusting algorithms have not been investigated. In this paper, we propose a watermark adjusting algorithm the goal of which is to maximize the throughput of each connection as much as possible without excessively suppressing the throughputs of the other connections. In our proposed algorithm, a newly established connection uses the initial watermark value of zero to avoid drastic network congestion and increases the value as long as its throughput increases. In addition, when a new connection is established, every already-established connection halves its watermark value to allow the newly established connection to use some portion of the bandwidth and increases again as long as its throughput increases. We compare the proposed algorithm (CW method) with other methods: the FW method that uses a fixed large watermark value and the NP method that does not use the PEP. Numerical results with respect to throughput and fairness showed that the CW method is generally superior to the other two methods.

The probability of making mistakes on the decoded signals at the relay has been used for the maximum-likelihood (ML) decision at the receiver in the decode-and-forward (DF) relay network. It is well known that deriving the probability is relatively easy for the uncoded single-antenna transmission with M-pulse amplitude modulation (PAM). However, in the multiplexing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, the multi-dimensional decision region is getting too complicated to derive the probability. In this paper, a high-performance near-ML decoder is devised by applying a well-known pairwise error probability (PEP) of two paired-signals at the relay in the MIMO DF relay network. It also proves that the near-ML decoder can achieve the maximum diversity of MSMD+MR min (MS,MD), where MS, MR, and MD are the number of antennas at the source, relay, and destination, respectively. The simulation results show that 1) the near-ML decoder achieves the diversity we derived and 2) the bit error probability of the near-ML decoder is almost the same as that of the ML decoder.

Many factors, such as noise level in the original image and the noise-removal methods that clean the image prior to performing a vectorization, may play an important role in affecting the line detection of raster-to-vector conversion methods. In this paper, we propose an empirical performance evaluation methodology that is coupled with a robust statistical analysis method to study many factors that may affect the quality of line detection. Three factors are studied: noise level, noise-removal method, and the raster-to-vector conversion method. Eleven mechanical engineering drawings, three salt-and-pepper noise levels, six noise-removal methods, and three commercial vectorization methods were used in the experiment. The Vector Recovery Index (VRI) of the detected vectors was the criterion used for the quality of line detection. A repeated measure ANOVA analyzed the VRI scores. The statistical analysis shows that all the studied factors affected the quality of line detection. It also shows that two-way interactions between the studied factors affected line detection.

A stochastic quasi-gradient algorithm is applied to design linear dispersion (LD) codes for two-way wireless relay networks under Rayleigh fading channels. The codes are designed to minimize an upper bound of the average pairwise error probability. Simulation results show that the codes obtained by the optimization technique achieve a coding gain over codes that are randomly generated based on the isotropic distribution.

Noise removal in engineering drawing is an important operation performed before other image analysis tasks. Many algorithms have been developed to remove salt-and-pepper noise from document images. Cleaning algorithms should remove noise while keeping the real part of the image unchanged. Some algorithms have disadvantages in cleaning operation that leads to removing of weak features such as short thin lines. Others leave the image with hairy noise attached to image objects. In this article a noise removal procedure called TrackAndMayDel (TAMD) is developed to enhance the noise removal of salt-and-pepper noise in binary images of engineering drawings. The procedure could be integrated with third party algorithms' logic to enhance their ability to remove noise by investigating the structure of pixels that are part of weak features. It can be integrated with other algorithms as a post-processing step to remove noise remaining in the image such as hairy noise attached with graphical elements. An algorithm is proposed by incorporating TAMD in a third party algorithm. Real scanned images from GREC'03 contest are used in the experiment. The images are corrupted by salt-and-pepper noise at 10%, 15%, and 20% levels. An objective performance measure that correlates with human vision as well as MSE and PSNR are used in this experiment. Performance evaluation of the introduced algorithm shows better-quality images compared to other algorithms.

In order to improve TCP performance, the use of a PEP (Performance Enhancing Proxy) has been proposed. The PEP operates on a router along a TCP connection. When a data packet arrives at the PEP, it forwards the packet to the destination host, transmits the corresponding ACK (premature ACK) to the source host on behalf of the destination host, and stores a copy of the packet in a local buffer (PEP buffer) in case the packet needs to be retransmitted. In this paper, in accordance with a strategy that keeps the number of prematurely acknowledged packets in the PEP buffer below a fixed threshold (watermark) value, we investigate the relation between the watermark value and the average throughput. Extensive simulations show that the results can be roughly classified into two cases. In the first case, the average throughput becomes larger for larger watermark values and becomes a constant value when the watermark value is over a certain value. In the second case, although the average throughput becomes larger for lager watermark value in the same way, it decreases when the watermark value is over a certain value. We also show that the latter (former) case can occur more easily as the propagation delay in the input side network of the PEP becomes smaller (larger) and the propagation delay in the output side network of the PEP becomes larger (smaller), and also show that the latter (former) case can occur more easily as the transmission speed in the input side network becomes larger (smaller) and the transmission speed in the output side network becomes smaller (larger) while the PEP buffer capacity becomes smaller (larger).

This paper describes two way satellite system environments on geostationary orbit (GEO) and performance enhancement mechanisms which reduces round trip time (RTT) and supports real-time services. We use performance enhancing proxy (PEP) for reducing round trip time and user-level real-time scheduler for reducing deadline violation tasks. The user-level real-time scheduling method classifies priority of user process into four types and those are reflected in kernel. With these dual performance enhancement mechanisms, we can improve quality of service (QoS) of end-user who connects to the DVB-RCS system.