IEICE Transactions on Communications
Online ISSN : 1745-1345
Print ISSN : 0916-8516
Volume E101.B, Issue 2
Displaying 1-37 of 37 articles from this issue
Special Section on Recent Progress in Antennas and Propagation in Conjunction with Main Topics of ISAP2016
  • Jiro HIROKAWA
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 261
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
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  • Wei HONG, Shiwen HE, Haiming WANG, Guangqi YANG, Yongming HUANG, Jixin ...
    Article type: INVITED PAPER
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 262-276
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    This paper presents an overview of the advance of the China millimeter-wave multiple gigabit (CMMG) wireless local area network (WLAN) system which operates in the 45 GHz frequency band. The CMMG WLAN system adopts the multiple antennas technologies to support data rate up to 15Gbps. During the progress of CMMG WLAN standardization, some new key technologies were introduced to adapt the millimeter-wave characteristic, including the usage of the zero correlation zone (ZCZ) sequence, a novel lower density parity check code (LDPC)-based packet encoding, and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) single carrier transmission. Extensive numerical results and system prototype test are also given to validate the performance of the technologies adopted by CMMG WLAN system.

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  • Hiroyuki DEGUCHI, Daichi HIGASHI, Hiroki YAMADA, Shogo MATSUMOTO, Miki ...
    Article type: INVITED PAPER
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 277-284
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    This paper proposes a genetic algorithm (GA) based design method for arbitrarily-shaped resonant elements that offer enhanced reflectarray antenna performance. All elements have the specified phase property over the range of 360°, and also have dual-polarization and low cross-polarization properties for better reflectarray performance. In addition, the proposal is suitable for linear-to-circular polarization conversion elements. Thus, polarizer reflectarray elements are also presented in this paper. The proposed elements are validated using both numerical simulations and experiments.

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  • Jian YANG, Fangfang FAN, Parastoo TAGHIKHANI, Abbas VOSOOGH
    Article type: INVITED PAPER
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 285-292
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    This paper presents a new form of gap waveguide technology - the half-height-pin gap waveguide. The gap waveguide technology is a new transmission line technology introduced recently, which makes use of the stopband of wave propagation created by a pair of parallel plates, one PEC (perfect electric conductor) and one PMC (perfect magnetic conductor), with an air gap in between less than a quarter of the wavelength at operation frequency. Applying this PEC/PMC gap plate structure to ridged waveguides, rectangular hollow waveguides and microstrip lines, we can have the ridged gap waveguides, groove gap waveguides and inverted gap waveguide microstrip lines, respectively, without requiring a conductive or galvanic contact between the upper PEC and the lower PMC plates. This contactless property of the gap waveguide technology relaxes significantly the manufacturing requirements for devices and antennas at millimeter wave frequencies. PMC material does not exist in nature, and an artificial PMC boundary can be made by such as periodic pin array with the pin length about a quarter wavelength. However, the quarter-wavelength pins, referred to as the full-height pins, are often too long for manufacturing. In order to overcome this difficulty, a new half-height-pin gap waveguide is introduced. The working principles and Q factors for the half-height-pin gap waveguides are described, analyzed and verified with measurements in this paper. It is concluded that half-height-pin gap waveguides have similar Q factors and operation bandwidth to the full-height-pin gap waveguides. As an example of the applications, a high gain planar array antenna at V band by using the half-height-pin gap waveguide has been designed and is presented in the paper with a good reflection coefficient and high aperture efficiency.

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  • Minseok KIM, Jun-ichi TAKADA, Kentaro SAITO
    Article type: INVITED PAPER
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 293-308
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    In order to utilize higher frequency bands above 6GHz, which is an important technical challenge in fifth generation mobile systems, radio propagation channel properties in a large variety of deployment scenarios should be thoroughly investigated. The authors' group has been involved in a fundamental research project aimed at investigating multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transmission performance and propagation channel properties at microwave frequency above 10GHz from 2009 to 2013, and since then they have been conducting measurement and modeling for high frequency bands. This paper aims at providing comprehensive tutorial of a whole procedure of channel modeling; multi-dimensional channel sounding, propagation channel measurement, analysis, and modeling, by introducing the developed MIMO channel sounders at high frequency bands of 11 and 60GHz and presenting some measurement results in a microcell environment at 11GHz. Furthermore, this paper identifies challenges in radio propagation measurements, and discusses current/future channel modeling issues as future works.

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  • Abdullah HASKOU, Dominique LEMUR, Sylvain COLLARDEY, Ala SHARAIHA
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 309-315
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    In this paper, we present a small, wide-band, Inverted-L Antenna (ILA) with non-Foster matching. The antenna's size is 9.5×19.5mm2 and it is integrated on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) of 90×35mm2. A design procedure is presented and sensitivity and stability analysis are performed. Experiments show that the non-Foster matched antenna has (S11 < -10dB) impedance bandwidth of 92.2% at a central frequency of 1.5GHz, whereas the passive antenna (without the non-Foster matching) has an impedance bandwidth of 12.6% at 2.46GHz.

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  • Dirk I. L. DE VILLIERS, Robert LEHMENSIEK, Marianna V. IVASHINA
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 316-323
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    Designing shaped offset Gregorian reflector systems to operate with several interchangeable feed horns, over frequency bandwidths of more than a decade, with multiple, often conflicting, performance figures of merit such as aperture efficiency, receiving sensitivity, sidelobe levels, and cross polarization isolation is a difficult optimization problem. An additional complication may be that the radiation patterns of all the feeds to be used in the system are not known at the time of the dish designs, as upgrades to the feeds may happen throughout the lifetime of large reflector systems. This paper presents a systematic parametric study to quantify the effects of the main causes of performance degradation in such a system, i.e. reflector diffraction and feed pattern variations. First, ideal Gaussian feed patterns are used in order to isolate the diffraction effects, and then the ideal patterns are varied to model the effect of using wideband feeds exhibiting radiation pattern variations over frequency. It is shown that the peak position in the shaping parameter space of the receiving sensitivity is not strongly influenced by diffraction - although the peak value is, as expected, reduced at lower frequencies. This allows similar feed patterns to be used in different frequency bands to still produce systems operating near the maximum sensitivity. When using non-ideal feed patterns it is shown that, for most performance metrics, diffraction effects dominate the feed variation performance degradation in smaller dishes. This allows possibly relaxed requirements on the radiation patterns of feeds used to illuminate electrically small reflector systems.

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  • Chow-Yen-Desmond SIM, Chih-Chiang CHEN, Che-Yu LI, Sheng-Yang HUANG
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 324-331
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    A compact uniplanar antenna design for tablet/laptop applications is proposed. The main design principle of this antenna is the use of the coupling-feed mechanism. The proposed antenna is composed of an inverted L-shaped parasitic element, T-shaped feeding strip, parasitic shorted strip, and a step tuning stub. With its small size of 55mm × 15mm × 0.8mm, the proposed antenna is able to excite dual wideband transmission over the full LTE/WWAN operation ranges of 698-960MHz and 1710-2690MHz. Furthermore, the proposed antenna also exhibits reduced ground effects, such that reducing the ground size of the proposed antenna will not affect its performance.

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  • Robert LEHMENSIEK, Dirk I. L. DE VILLIERS
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 332-339
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    Predicting the receiving sensitivity of an offset Gregorian reflector system antenna requires an accurate prediction of the antenna noise temperature. Calculating the antenna noise temperature is computationally intensive especially for the electrically larger reflector systems. Using the main reflector masking technique, which removes the main reflector from the calculation domain, considerably reduces the computation cost. For an electrically smaller reflector system, diffraction effects affect the accuracy of this technique. Recently an improvement to the technique was proposed that introduces diffraction compensation correction factors. In this paper we introduce new compensation factor and interpolation techniques that improve the accuracy of the approximated antenna noise temperature calculation. The techniques are applied to several offset Gregorian reflector systems similar to those considered for the Square Kilometre Array, with various feeds and the accuracy in terms of receiving sensitivity is evaluated. The techniques can reduce the prediction error of the receiving sensitivity for frequency-invariant feeds to fractions of a percent, while maintaining a significant speed-up over direct calculations.

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  • Masafumi NAGASAKA, Susumu NAKAZAWA, Shoji TANAKA
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 340-348
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) started test satellite broadcasting of ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV) on August 1st, 2016. The test broadcasting is being provided in the 12-GHz (11.7 to 12.75GHz) band with right-hand circular polarization. In 2018, left-hand circular polarization in the same frequency band will be used for satellite broadcasting of UHDTV. Because UHDTV satellite broadcasting uses the 16APSK modulation scheme, which requires a higher carrier-to-noise ratio than that used for HDTV in Japan, it is important to mitigate the cross-polarization interference. Therefore, we fabricated and tested a dual-circularly polarized offset parabolic reflector antenna that has a feed antenna composed of a 2×2 microstrip antenna array, which is sequentially rotated to enhance the polarization purity. Measured results showed that the fabricated antenna complied with our requirements, a voltage standing wave ratio of less than 1.4, antenna gain of 34.5dBi (i.e., the aperture efficiency was 69%), and cross-polarization discrimination of 28.7dB.

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  • Hideki KIRINO, Kazuhiro HONDA, Kun LI, Koichi OGAWA
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 349-356
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    A new Waffle-iron Ridge Guide (WRG) structure that has the ability to control both wavelength and impedance is proposed. With the proposed structure, not only can the wavelength be controlled over a wide range for both fast- and slow-waves in free space but the impedance can also be controlled. These features can improve the performance of array antennas in terms of reducing grating lobes and side lobes. In this paper, we discuss and evaluate a design scheme using equivalent circuits and EM-simulation. This paper also discusses how the conductivity and dielectric loss in the WRG affect the total gain of the array antenna.

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  • Yang LI, Hiroyasu SATO, Qiang CHEN
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 357-363
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    To design antennas for ingestible capsule endoscope systems, the transmission factors of dipole and loop antennas placed in the torso-shaped phantom filled with deionized water or human body equivalent liquid (HBEL) are investigated by numerical and experimental study. The S-parameter method is used to evaluate transmission characteristics through a torso-shaped phantom in a broadband frequency range. Good agreement of S-parameters between measured results and numerical analysis is observed and the transmission factors for both cases are obtained. Comparison of the transmission factors between HBEL and deionized water is presented to explain the relation between conductivity and the transmission characteristics. Two types of antennas, dipole antenna and loop antenna are compared. In the case of a dipole antenna placed in deionized water, it is observed that the transmission factor decreases as conductivity increases. On the other hand, there is a local maximum in the transmission factor at 675 MHz in the case of HBEL. This phenomenon is not observed in the case of a loop antenna. The transmission factor of capsule dipole antenna and capsule loop antenna are compared and the guideline in designing capsule antennas by using transmission factor is also proposed.

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  • Yuzo TAMAKI, Takehiko KOBAYASHI, Atsushi TOMIKI
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas Measurement
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 364-372
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    Precise determination of antenna phase centers is crucial to reduce the uncertainty in gain when employing the three-antenna method, particularly when the range distances are short-such as a 3-m radio anechoic chamber, where the distance between the phase centers and the open ends of an aperture antenna (the most commonly-used reference) is not negligible compared with the propagation distance. An automatic system to determine the phase centers of aperture antennas in a radio anechoic chamber is developed. In addition, the absolute gain of horn antennas is evaluated using the three-antenna method. The phase centers of X-band pyramidal horns were found to migrate up to 18mm from the open end. Uncertainties in the gain were evaluated in accordance with ISO/IEC Guide 93-3: 2008. The 95% confidence interval of the horn antenna gain was reduced from 0.57 to 0.25dB, when using the phase center location instead of the open end. The phase centers, gains, polarization, and radiation patterns of space-borne antennas are measured: low and medium-gain X-band antennas for an ultra small deep space probe employing the polarization pattern method with use of the horn antenna. The 95% confidence interval in the antenna gain decreased from 0.74 to 0.47dB.

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  • Motoharu SASAKI, Minoru INOMATA, Wataru YAMADA, Naoki KITA, Takeshi ON ...
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Propagation
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 373-382
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    This paper describes analytical results obtained for floor penetration loss characteristics and their frequency dependency by measurements in multiple frequency bands, including those above 6GHz, in an indoor office environment. Measurement and analysis results confirm that the floor penetration loss depends on two dominant components: the transmission path through floors, and the path traveling through the outside building. We also clarify that these dominant paths have different path loss characteristics and frequency dependency. The transmission path through floors rapidly attenuates with large inter-floor offsets and in high frequency bands. On the other hand, the path traveling through outside of the building attenuates monotonically as the frequency increases. Therefore, the transmission path is dominant at short inter-floor offsets and low frequencies, and the path traveling through the outside is dominant at high number of floors or high frequency. Finally, we clarify that the floor penetration loss depends on the frequency dependency of the dominant path on the basis of the path loss characteristics of each dominant path.

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  • Zhi ZHENG, Yuxuan YANG, Wen-Qin WANG, Guangjun LI, Jiao YANG, Yan GE
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: DOA Estimation
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 383-391
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    This paper proposes a novel method for two-dimensional (2-D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple signals employing a sparse L-shaped array structured by a sparse linear array (SLA), a sparse uniform linear array (SULA) and an auxiliary sensor. In this method, the elevation angles are estimated by using the SLA and an efficient search approach, while the azimuth angle estimation is performed in two stages. In the first stage, the rough azimuth angle estimates are obtained by utilizing a noise-free cross-covariance matrix (CCM), the estimated elevation angles and data from three sensors including the auxiliary sensor. In the second stage, the fine azimuth angle estimates can be achieved by using the shift-invariance property of the SULA and the rough azimuth angle estimates. Without extra pair-matching process, the proposed method can achieve automatic pairing of the 2-D DOA estimates. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms the compared methods, especially in the cases of low SNR, snapshot deficiency and multiple sources.

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  • Katsumi SASAKI, Naoki HONMA, Takeshi NAKAYAMA, Shoichi IIZUKA
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: DOA Estimation
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 392-399
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    This paper presents the Received-Signal-Strength-Indicator (RSSI) based living-body radar, which uses only a single RF front-end and a few parasitic antennas. This radar measures the RSSI variation at the single active antenna while varying the terminations of the parasitic antennas. The propagation channel is estimated from just the temporal transition of RSSI; our proposal reconstructs the phase information of the signal. In this paper, we aim to estimate the direction of living-body. Experiments are carried out and it is found that most angular errors are within the limit of the angular width of the living-body.

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  • Ryota TAZAWA, Naoki HONMA, Atsushi MIURA, Hiroto MINAMIZAWA
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: DOA Estimation
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 400-408
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    In this paper, we propose an indoor localization method that uses only the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) of signals transmitted from wireless beacons. The beacons use three-element array antennas, and the position of the receiving terminal is estimated by using multiple DOD information. Each beacon transmits four beacon signals with different directivities by feeding signals to the three-element array antennas via 180-degree and 90-degree hybrids. The correlation matrix of the propagation channels is estimated from just the strength of the signals, and the DOD is estimated from the calculated correlation matrix. For determining the location of the receiving terminal, the existence probability function is introduced. Experiments show that the proposed method attains lower position estimation error than the conventional method.

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  • Masanori GOCHO, Hiroyoshi YAMADA, Motofumi ARII, Shoichiro KOJIMA, Ryo ...
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Remote Sensing
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 409-417
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    SAR tomography is one of the methods that can perform 3-dimensional (3-D) imaging with multiple SAR datasets by using the Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation technique to estimate the height distribution of scatterers. Several reports on SAR tomography have been issued. However, experimental results of the SAR tomography by the Pi-SAR2-X, Japanese airborne SAR operated by the NICT, have not been reported yet. This paper is the first to report the results of experiments on the Japanese SAR platform. High-resolution 2-dimensional image can be obtained by the X-band SAR. However the image is generated by projecting 3-D objects in to a 2-D image plane, hence the target responses having the same slant-range distance locate at the same image pixel. This is well known as the layover problem. When we employ the X-band SAR tomography, we can obtain 3-D high-resolution images without the layover and also foreshortening problem. It will be useful for disaster damage monitoring, especially in urban areas. The main difficulty of the SAR tomography comes from the phase error caused by inaccurate flight-path data. In many cases, the dataset are preprocessed and compensated so as to parallelize their flight-path to carry out the phase calibration and the DOA estimation easily. However, it is often difficult for common users to obtain such preprocessed datasets. In this paper, we propose a simple calibration method by using a flat-surface area with known altitude. Experiments show that the proposed method is effective for the Pi-SAR2-X standard products without parallelized preprocessing or precise flight-path information.

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  • Dal-Jae YUN, Jae-In LEE, Ky-Ung BAE, Won-Young SONG, Noh-Hoon MYUNG
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Electromagnetic Analysis
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 418-425
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    Three-dimensional (3-D) scattering center models use a finite number of point scatterers to efficiently represent complex radar target signature. Using the CLEAN algorithm, 3-D scattering center model is extracted from the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image, which is generated based on the shooting and bouncing ray (SBR) technique. The conventional CLEAN extracts the strongest peak iteratively based on the assumption that the scattering centers are isolated. In a realistic target, however, both interference from the closely spaced points and additive noise distort the extraction process. This paper proposes a matched filter-based CLEAN algorithm to improve accuracy efficiently. Using the matched filtering of which impulse response is the known point spread function (PSF), a point most correlated with the PSF is extracted. Thus, the proposed method optimally enhances the accuracy in the presence of massive distortions. Numerical simulations using canonical and realistic targets demonstrate that the extraction accuracy is improved without loss of time-efficiency compared with the existing CLEAN algorithms.

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  • Tomoki MURAKAMI, Koichi ISHIHARA, Yasushi TAKATORI, Masato MIZOGUCHI, ...
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: MIMO
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 426-433
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    This paper proposes a novel method of reducing channel state information (CSI) feedback by using transmit antenna selection for downlink multiuser multiple input multiple output (DL-MU-MIMO) transmission in dense distributed antenna systems. It is widely known that DL-MU-MIMO transmission achieves higher total bit-rate by mitigating inter-user interference based on pre-coding techniques. The pre-coding techniques require CSI between access point (AP) and multiple users. However, overhead for CSI acquisition degrades the transmission efficiency of DL-MU-MIMO transmission. In the proposed CSI feedback reduction method, AP first selects the antenna set that maximizes the received power at each user, second it skips the sequence of CSI feedback for users whose signal to interference power ratio is larger than a threshold, and finally it performs DL-MU-MIMO transmission to multiple users by using the selected antenna set. To clarify the proposed method, we evaluate it by computer simulations in an indoor scenario. The results show that the proposed method can offer higher transmission efficiency than the conventional DL-MU-MIMO transmission with the usual CSI feedback method.

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  • Yuta KASHINO, Masakuni TSUNEZAWA, Naoki HONMA, Kentaro NISHIMORI
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: MIMO
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 434-440
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    In-band full-duplex (FD) Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication performs uplink and downlink transmission at the same time using the same frequency. In this system, the spectral efficiency is theoretically double that of conventional duplex schemes, such as Time Division Duplex (TDD) and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD). However, this system suffers interference because the uplink and downlink streams coexist within the same channel. Especially at the terminal side, it is quite difficult for the terminal to eliminate the interference signals from other terminals since it has no knowledge about the contents of the interference signals. This paper presents an inter-terminal interference suppression method between the uplink and downlink signals assuming the multi-user environment. This method uses eigen-beamforming at the transmitting terminal to direct the null to the other terminal. Since this beamforming technique reduces the degrees of freedom available, the interference suppression performance and transmitting data-rate have a trade-off relation. This study investigates the system capacity characteristics in multi-user full-duplex MIMO communication using the propagation channel information measured in an actual outdoor experiment and shows that the proposed communication scheme offers higher system capacity than the conventional scheme.

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  • Pham-Viet TUAN, Insoo KOO
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Wireless Communication Technologies
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 441-450
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    This paper studies a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system in which the transmitter not only sends data and energy to many types of wireless users, such as multiple information decoding users, multiple hybrid power-splitting users (i.e., users with a power-splitting structure to receive both information and energy), and multiple energy harvesting users, but also prevents information from being intercepted by a passive eavesdropper. The transmitter is equipped with multiple antennas, whereas all users and the eavesdropper are assumed to be equipped with a single antenna. Since the transmitter does not have any channel state information (CSI) about the eavesdropper, artificial noise (AN) power is maximized to mask information as well as to interfere with the eavesdropper as much as possible. The non-convex optimization problem is formulated to minimize the transmit power satisfying all signal-to-interference-plus-noise (SINR) and harvested energy requirements for all users so that the remaining power for generating AN is maximized. With perfect CSI, a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique is applied, and the optimal solution is proven to be tight. With imperfect CSI, SDR and a Gaussian randomization algorithm are proposed to find the suboptimal solution. Finally, numerical performance with respect to the maximum SINR at the eavesdropper is determined by a Monte-Carlo simulation to compare the proposed AN scenario with a no-AN scenario, as well as to compare perfect CSI with imperfect CSI.

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  • Kenji HOSHINO, Manabu MIKAMI, Sourabh MAITI, Hitoshi YOSHINO
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Wireless Communication Technologies
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 451-461
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    Non-linear precoding (NLP) scheme for downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (DL-MU-MIMO) transmission has received much attention as a promising technology to achieve high capacity within the limited bandwidths available to radio access systems. In order to minimize the required transmission power for DL-MU-MIMO and achieve high spectrum efficiency, Vector Perturbation (VP) was proposed as an optimal NLP scheme. Unfortunately, the original VP suffers from significant computation complexity in detecting the optimal perturbation vector from an infinite number of the candidates. To reduce the complexity with near transmission performance of VP, several recent studies investigated various efficient NLP schemes based on the concept of Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) that applies successive pre-cancellation of inter-user interference (IUI) and offsets the transmission vector based on a modulo operation. In order to attain transmission performance improvement over the original THP, a previous work proposed Minimum Mean Square Error based THP (MMSE-THP) employing IUI successive pre-cancellation based on MMSE criteria. On the other hand, to improve the transmission performance of MMSE-THP, other previous works proposed Ordered MMSE-THP and Lattice-Reduction-Aided MMSE-THP (LRA MMSE-THP). This paper investigates the further transmission performance improvement of Ordered MMSE-THP and LRA MMSE-THP. This paper starts by proposing an extension of MMSE-THP employing a perturbation vector search (PVS), called PVS MMSE-THP as a novel NLP scheme, where the modulo operation is substituted by PVS and a subtraction operation from the transmit signal vector. Then, it introduces an efficient search algorithm of appropriate perturbation vector based on a depth-first branch-and-bound search for PVS MMSE-THP. Next, it also evaluates the transmission performance of PVS MMSE-THP with the appropriate perturbation vector detected by the efficient search algorithm. Computer simulations quantitatively clarify that PVS MMSE-THP achieves better transmission performance than the conventional NLP schemes. Moreover, it also clarifies that PVS MMSE-THP increases the effect of required transmission power reduction with the number of transmit antennas compared to the conventional NLP schemes.

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Regular Section
  • Yoshihiko UEMATSU, Shohei KAMAMURA, Hiroki DATE, Hiroshi YAMAMOTO, Aki ...
    Article type: POSITION PAPER
    Subject area: Transmission Systems and Transmission Equipment for Communications
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 462-475
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 08, 2017
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    An optical transport network is composed of optical transport systems deployed in thousands of office-buildings. As a common infrastructure to accommodate diversified communication services with drastic traffic growth, it is necessary not only to continuously convey the growing traffic but also to achieve high end-to-end communication quality and availability and provide flexible controllability in cooperation with service layer networks. To achieve high-speed and large-capacity transport systems cost-effectively, system configuration, applied devices, and the manufacturing process have recently begun to change, and the cause of failure or performance degradation has become more complex and diversified. The drastic traffic growth and pattern change of service networks increase the frequency and scale of transport-capacity increase and transport-network reconfiguration in cooperation with service networks. Therefore, drastic traffic growth affects both optical-transport-system configuration and its operational cycles. In this paper, we give an overview of the operational problems emerging in current nationwide optical transport networks, and based on trends analysis for system configuration and network-control schemes, we propose a vision of the future nationwide optical-transport-network architecture expressed using five target features.

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  • Nguyen VIET HA, Kazumi KUMAZOE, Masato TSURU
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Fundamental Theories for Communications
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 476-488
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: July 27, 2017
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    The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) with Network Coding (TCP/NC) was proposed to introduce packet loss recovery ability at the sink without TCP retransmission, which is realized by proactively sending redundant combination packets encoded at the source. Although TCP/NC is expected to mitigate the goodput degradation of TCP over lossy networks, the original TCP/NC does not work well in burst loss and time-varying channels. No apparent scheme was provided to decide and change the network coding-related parameters (NC parameters) to suit the diverse and changeable loss conditions. In this paper, a solution to support TCP/NC in adapting to mentioned conditions is proposed, called TCP/NC with Loss Rate and Loss Burstiness Estimation (TCP/NCwLRLBE). Both the packet loss rate and burstiness are estimated by observing transmitted packets to adapt to burst loss channels. Appropriate NC parameters are calculated from the estimated probability of successful recoverable transmission based on a mathematical model of packet losses. Moreover, a new mechanism for coding window handling is developed to update NC parameters in the coding system promptly. The proposed scheme is implemented and validated in Network Simulator 3 with two different types of burst loss model. The results suggest the potential of TCP/NCwLRLBE to mitigate the TCP goodput degradation in both the random loss and burst loss channels with the time-varying conditions.

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  • Jae Kwan LEE, Tae Ho CHO
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Fundamental Theories for Communications
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 489-499
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: July 27, 2017
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    Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are randomly deployed in a hostile environment and left unattended. These networks are composed of small auto mouse sensor devices which can monitor target information and send it to the Base Station (BS) for action. The sensor nodes can easily be compromised by an adversary and the compromised nodes can be used to inject false vote or false report attacks. To counter these two kinds of attacks, the Probabilistic Voting-based Filtering Scheme (PVFS) was proposed by Li and Wu, which consists of three phases; 1) Key Initialization and assignment, 2) Report generation, and 3) En-route filtering. This scheme can be a successful countermeasure against these attacks, however, when one or more nodes are compromised, the re-distribution of keys is not handled. Therefore, after a sensor node or Cluster Head (CH) is compromised, the detection power and effectiveness of PVFS is reduced. This also results in adverse effects on the sensor network's lifetime. In this paper, we propose a Fuzzy Rule-based Key Redistribution Method (FRKM) to address the limitations of the PVFS. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by improving the detection power by up to 13.75% when the key-redistribution period is not fixed. Moreover, the proposed method achieves an energy improvement of up to 9.2% over PVFS.

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  • Donggu KIM, Hoojin LEE, Joonhyuk KANG
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Fundamental Theories for Communications
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 500-507
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    To effectively analyze the influence of two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading on the achievable error rate performance of binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signaling, we derive two novel concise asymptotic closed-form bit error rate (BER) formulas. We perform asymptotic analysese based on existing exact and approximate BER formulas, which are obtained from the exact probability density function (PDF) or moment generating function (MGF), and the approximate PDF of TWDP fading. The derived asymptotic closed-form expressions yield explicit insights into the achievable error rate performance in TWDP fading environments. Furthermore, the absolute relative error (ARE) between the exact and approximate coding gains is investigated, from which we also propose a criterion for the order of an approximate PDF, which is more robust than the conventional criterion. Numerical results clearly demonstrate the accuracy of the derived asymptotic formulas, and also support our proposed criterion.

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  • David FERNÁNDEZ HERMIDA, Miguel RODELGO LACRUZ, Cristina LÓPEZ BRAVO, ...
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Network
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 508-519
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: July 26, 2017
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    The growth of Internet traffic and the variety of traffic classes make network performance extremely difficult to evaluate. Even though most current methods rely on complex or costly hardware, recent research on bandwidth sharing has suggested the possibility of defining evaluation methods that simply require basic statistics on aggregated link utilization, such as mean and variance. This would greatly simplify monitoring systems as these statistics are easily calculable from Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) calls. However, existing methods require knowledge of certain fixed information about the network being monitored (e.g. link capacities). This is usually unavailable when the operator's view is limited to its share of leased links or when shared links carry traffic with different priorities. In this paper, departing from the analysis of aggregated link utilization statistics obtainable from SNMP requests, we propose a method that detects traffic degradation based on link utilization samples. It does not require knowledge of the capacity of the aggregated link or any other network parameters, giving network operators the possibility to control network performance in a more reliable and cost-effective way.

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  • Sungbok LEE, Jaehyun PARK, Jonghyeok LEE
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Network
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 520-527
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 07, 2017
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    In this paper, we consider wireless powered sensor networks. In these networks, the energy access point (EAP) transmits the energy packets to the sensor nodes and then, the sensor nodes send their sensing data to the information access point (IAP) by exploiting the harvested energy. Because the sensor nodes have a limited information queue (data storage) and energy queue (battery), energy packet/data packet scheduling is important. Accordingly, to reduce the total energy required to support the associated sensor network and simultaneously avoid sensing data loss, the energy packet/data packet transmission periods are jointly optimized. Furthermore, analyses identify the optimal location of EAP which will yield energy-efficient wireless powered sensor networks. Through the computer simulations, the performance of the proposed packet scheduling and deployment policy is demonstrated.

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  • Dai SUZUKI, Satoshi IMAI, Toru KATAGIRI
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Network
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 528-537
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 08, 2017
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    Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is expected to provide network systems that offer significantly lower cost and greatly flexibility to network service providers and their users. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to implement Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) that can equal the performance of Physical Network Functions. To realize NFV systems that have adequate performance, it is critical to accurately grasp VNF workload. In this paper, we focus on the virtual firewall as a representative VNF. The workload of the virtual firewall is mostly determined by firewall rule processing and the Access Control List (ACL) configurations. Therefore, we first reveal the major factors influencing the workload of the virtual firewall and some issues of monitoring CPU load as a traditional way of understanding the workload of virtual firewalls through preliminary experiments. Additionally, we propose a new workload metric for the virtual firewall that is derived by mathematical models of the firewall workload in consideration of the packet processing in each rule and the ACL configurations. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of the proposed workload metric through various experiments.

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  • Yousuke TAKAHASHI, Keisuke ISHIBASHI, Masayuki TSUJINO, Noriaki KAMIYA ...
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Internet
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 538-547
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 07, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

    To efficiently use network resources, internet service providers need to conduct traffic engineering that dynamically controls traffic routes to accommodate traffic change with limited network resources. The performance of traffic engineering (TE) depends on the accuracy of traffic prediction. However, the size of traffic change has been drastically increasing in recent years due to the growth in various types of network services, which has made traffic prediction difficult. Our approach to tackle this issue is to separate traffic into predictable and unpredictable parts and to apply different control policies. However, there are two challenges to achieving this: dynamically separating traffic according to predictability and dynamically controlling routes for each separated traffic part. In this paper, we propose a macroflow-based TE scheme that uses different routing policies in accordance with traffic predictability. We also propose a traffic-separation algorithm based on real-time traffic analysis and a framework for controlling separated traffic with software-defined networking technology, particularly OpenFlow. An evaluation of actual traffic measured in an Internet2 network shows that compared with current TE schemes the proposed scheme can reduce the maximum link load by 34% (at the most congested time) and the average link load by an average of 11%.

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  • Pei CHEN, Dexiu HU, Yongjun ZHAO, Chengcheng LIU
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas and Propagation
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 548-554
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    Aiming at solving the performance degradation caused by the covariance matrix mismatch in wideband beamforming for conformal arrays, a novel adaptive beamforming algorithm is proposed in this paper. In this algorithm, the interference-plus-noise covariance matrix is firstly reconstructed to solve the desired signal contamination problem. Then, a sparse reconstruction method is utilized to reduce the high computational cost and the requirement of sampling data. A novel cost function is formulated by the focusing matrix and singular value decomposition. Finally, the optimization problem is efficiently solved in a second-order cone programming framework. Simulation results using a cylindrical array demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm and prove that this algorithm can achieve superior performance over the existing wideband beamforming methods for conformal arrays.

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  • Nozomi HAGA, Masaharu TAKAHASHI
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Antennas and Propagation
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 555-563
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 14, 2017
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    This paper proposes a circuit modeling technique for electrically-very-small devices, e.g. electrodes for intrabody communications, coils for wireless power transfer systems, high-frequency transformers, etc. The proposed technique is based on the method of moments and can be regarded as an improved version of the partial element equivalent circuit method.

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  • Nitish RAJORIA, Hiromu KAMEI, Jin MITSUGI, Yuusuke KAWAKITA, Haruhisa ...
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Wireless Communication Technologies
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 564-572
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 03, 2017
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    Multiple Subcarrier Multiple Access (MSMA) enables concurrent sensor data streamings from multiple wireless and batteryless sensors using the principle of subcarrier backscatter used extensively in passive RFID. Since the interference cancellation performance of MSMA depends on the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio of each subcarrier, the choice of channel allocation scheme is essential. Since the channel allocation is a combinatorial problem, obtaining the true optimal allocation requires a vast amount of examinations which is impracticable in a system where we have tens of sensor RF tags. It is particularly true when we have variable distance and variable bandwidth sensor RF tags. This paper proposes a channel allocation scheme in the variable distance and variable bandwidth MSMA system based on a newly introduced performance index, total contamination power, to prioritize indecision cases. The performance of the proposal is evaluated with existing methods in terms of average communication capacity and system fairness using MATLAB Monte Carlo simulation to reveal its advantage. The accuracy of the simulation is also verified with the result obtained from the brute force method.

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  • Siye WANG, Yonghua LI, Mingyao WANG, Wenbo XU
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Wireless Communication Technologies
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 573-581
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 22, 2017
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    In this paper, we consider a two-hop communication system with an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay under channel estimation errors. According to the channel quality of the link between the base station (BS) and the relay, we investigate two typical relay scenarios. We study the capacity performance for both In-Band Full-Duplex (IBFD) and Half-Duplex (HD) transmission modes. Moreover, we consider two operation modes of the user equipment (UE) for each scenario. Closed-form expressions of ergodic capacities with channel estimation errors are obtained for scenario-1. And we derive accurate approximations of ergodic capacities for scenario-2. Numerical experiments are conducted to verify the analytical results and show that our theoretical derivations are perfectly matched with the simulations. We show that with practical signal-to-noise ratio values and effective interference cancellation techniques, IBFD transmission is preferable in terms of capacity.

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  • Chun-Hao LIAO, Makoto SUZUKI, Hiroyuki MORIKAWA
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Wireless Communication Technologies
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 582-591
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 07, 2017
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    Concurrent transmission (CT) is a revolutionary multi-hop protocol that significantly improves the MAC- and network-layer efficiency by allowing synchronized packet collisions. Although its superiority has been empirically verified, there is still a lack of studies on how the receiver survives such packet collisions, particularly in the presence of the carrier frequency offsets (CFO) between the transmitters. This work rectifies this omission by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the physical-layer receiver performance under CT, and a theoretical analysis on the fading duration of the beating effect resulting from the CFO. The main findings from our evaluations are the following points. (1) Beating significantly affects the receiver performance, and an error correcting mechanism is needed to combat the beating. (2) In IEEE 802.15.4 systems, the direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) plays such a role in combatting the beating. (3) However, due to the limited length of DSSS, the receiver still suffers from the beating if the fading duration is too long. (4) On the other hand, the basic M-ary FSK mode of IEEE 802.15.4g is vulnerable to CT due to the lack of error correcting mechanism. In view of the importance of the fading duration, we further theoretically derive the closed form of the average fading duration (AFD) of the beating under CT in terms of the transmitter number and the standard deviation of the CFO. Moreover, we prove that the receiver performance can be improved by having higher CFO deviations between the transmitters due to the shorter AFD. Finally, we estimate the AFD in the real system by actually measuring the CFO of a large number of sensor nodes.

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  • Jasper Meynard P. ARANA, Rothna PEC, Yong Soo CHO
    Article type: PAPER
    Subject area: Terrestrial Wireless Communication/Broadcasting Technologies
    2018 Volume E101.B Issue 2 Pages 592-602
    Published: February 01, 2018
    Released on J-STAGE: February 01, 2018
    Advance online publication: August 07, 2017
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    An efficient handover measurement technique is proposed for millimeter-wave (mm-wave) cellular systems with directional antenna beams. As the beam synchronization signal (BSS) carries the cell ID and the beam ID in a hierarchal manner, handover events (interbeam handover and intercell handover) are distinguished at the physical layer. The proposed signal metrics are shown to be effective in detecting the beam boundaries and cell boundaries in mm-wave cellular systems, which allows to distinguish interbeam handover from intercell handover. The proposed handover measurement technique is shown to reduce the processing time significantly using the proposed signal metrics produced by the BSS.

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