Thyristor Input-Protection Device Suitable for CMOS RF IC’s

Based on simulation results and accompanying analysis, we suggest a thyristor-type ESD protection device structure suitable for implementation in standard CMOS processes to reduce the parasitic capacitances added to the input nodes, which is very important in CMOS RF ICs. We compare DC breakdown characteristics of the suggested device to those of a conventional NMOS protection device to show the benefits of using the suggested device for ESD protection. The characteristic improvements are demonstrated and the corresponding mechanisms are explained based on simulations. Structure dependencies are also examined to define the optimal structure. AC simulation results are introduced to estimate the magnitude of reduction in the added parasitic capacitance when using the suggested device for ESD protection. The analysis shows a possibility of reducing the added parasitic capacitance down to about 1/45 of that resulting with a conventional NMOS protection transistor, while maintaining robustness against ESD.Jin-Young Choi was born in Seoul, Korea in 1956. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Seoul National University, Korea, in 1979, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Florida, USA, in 1986 and 1991, respectively. In 1991, he joined Samsung Electronics Memory Division, Korea, where he was engaged in high-speed SRAM development. In 1992, he moved to the Hongik University, Jochiwon, Korea, where he is now an associate professor. His recent research interests include the high-frequency modeling of CMOS devices, CMOS RF circuit design, and analysis & design for ESD protection.Woo Suk Yang was born in Seoul, Korea in 1957. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Seoul National University, Korea, in 1979, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the North Calorina State University, USA, in 1990. His doctorial research was in the area of signal processing. In 1990, he joined LG Electronics Co. Korea. In 1991, he moved to the Hongik University, Jochiwon, Korea, where he is now a professor. His recent research interests include the high-frequency modeling and various topics in signal processing area.Dongmin Kim was born in Korea in 1956. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Seoul National University, Korea, in 1979 and 1984, respectively and the Ph.D. degree in ECE from the University of Michigan, USA, in 1996. Now, he is an assistant professor of the Hongik University, Jochiwon, Korea. His recent research interests include circuit design and analysis.Youngju Kim was born in Seoul, Korea in 1957. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Seoul National University, Korea in 1980 and 1985, respectively and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic University of New York, USA, in 1995, respectively. In 1996, he joined the Hongik University, Jochiwon, Korea, where he is now an assistance professor. His recent research interests include the RF circuit design and LIN wireless systems.     

A Hybrid Error Recovery scheme for Scalable Video Transmission over 3G Cellular Broadcast Networks

The cdma2000 1xEV-DO mobile communication system provides broadcast and multicast services (BCMCS) to meet an increasing demand for multimedia data services. But the servicing of video streams over a BCMCS network faces a challenge from the unreliable and error-prone nature of the radio channel. BCMCS uses Reed-Solomon coding integrated with the MAC protocol for error recovery. We show that this is not effective for mobiles moving at the edge of service area, where the channel condition is bad, resulting in significantly lower video quality. To improve the playback quality of an MPEG-4 FGS (fine granularity scalability) video stream, we propose a hybrid error recovery scheme incorporating a packet scheduler, which uses slots saved by reducing the Reed-Solomon coding overhead. Packets to be retransmitted are prioritized by a utility function which reduces the packet error-rate in the application layer within a fixed retransmission budget by considering of the map of the error control block at each mobile node. Our error recovery scheme also uses the characteristics of MPEG-4 FGS to improve the video quality even for a slow-moving mobile which is experiencing a high error-rate in the physical channel because of error bursts. Kyungtae Kang received B.S. (1999) and M.S. (2001) degrees in computer engineering from Seoul National University, Korea. He received Ph.D. degree in Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University, Korea in 2007. He is a member of IEEE and IEICE. His research interests include packet scheduling, error control, QoS provision, and energy minimization issues in nextgeneration wireless/mobile networks. In particular, he is researching the performance and energy requirements of 3G cellular broadcast services such as BCMCS and MBMS. Yongwoo Cho received the Premedical Degree from the College of Medicine, University of Ulsan, in 1997, a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Korea National Open University in 2004, while he was an military service, and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University in 2006. He has worked as a researcher in Dooin Corp. and as a general manager in Bluecord Technology, Inc. His primary interests include multimedia systems, digital broadcasting, next-generation wireless/mobile networks, error control, real-time computing, and low-power design. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Seoul National University. Heonshik Shin received the B.S. degree in applied physics from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1973. Since he received Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985, he has actively involved himself in researches of various topics, ranging from real-time computing and distributed computing to mobile systems and software. He is currently a professor of School of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University.     

Effectiveness of Reliable Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Due to unpredictable topology change and frequent link failure, it becomes evident major challenge to provide the stable route between source and destination in mobile ad hoc networks. Unlike previous multipath routing schemes for redundancy and unicast routing protocol utilizing the longest route expiration time measured by geographical information supported by Global Positioning System (GPS), we develop a framework to establish the most stable route based on measured frequency of link failure, available battery as well as the number of actual connections. To evaluate performance of proposed scheme, we provide practical simulation results for multipath and unicast routing protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio, control overhead, average hop length as well as end-to-end delay. Through analysis of simulation results, we demonstrate that our scheme shows better performance than general unicast routing protocol as well as similar packet delivery ratio to multipath routing protocol with less maintenance overhead. Ki-Il Kim received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Korea, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. He is currently with Department of Information Science, Gyeongsang National University as a faculty member. His research interests include routing for MANET, QoS in wireless network, multicast, and sensor networks. Sang-Ha Kim received the B.S. degree in chemistry from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1980. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in quantum scattering and computer science from the University of Houston, Houston, TX, in 1984 and 1989, respectively. From 1990 to 1991, he was with the Supercomputing Center, SERI, Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) as Senior Researcher. He joined Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Korea, in 1992, where he is a Professor. His current research interests include wireless networks, ad hoc networks, QoS, optical networks, and network analysis.     

DREAM : Density Aware Overlay Multicast Forwarding in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Instead of multicast functionality on a network entity, the overlay multicast schemes support multicast service with help of underlying unicast routing protocol. However, due to a node's free migration and communication based on broadcasting capability, effectiveness of overlay multicast scheme is not guaranteed in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). Specially, nodes' density within some areas changes frequently so heterogeneous forwarding scheme based on density is strongly desired in order to reduce a number of collisions as well as enhance resource utilization. To achieve this, in this paper, we introduce a new forwarding scheme, called as DREAM (Density aware overlay Multicast forwarding). A key feature of DREAM is to introduce a scoped flooding where the nodes densely locates, on the other hand, data forwarding based on unicast routing protocol is maintained in sparse environment. Distinct advantages are evaluated by simulation. Ki-Il Kim received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Korea, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. He is currently with Department of Information Science, Gyeongsang National University as a faculty member. His research interests include routing for MANET, QoS in wireless network, multicast, and sensor networks. Sang-Ha Kim received the B.S. degree in chemistry from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1980. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in quantum scattering and computer science from the University of Houston, Houston, TX, in 1984 and 1989, respectively. From 1990 to 1991, he was with the Supercomputing Center, SERI, Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) as Senior Researcher. He joined Chungnam National University, Daejeon,Korea, in 1992, where he is a Professor. His current research interests include wireless networks, ad hoc networks, QoS, optical networks, and network analysis.     

On Downlink Beamforming Methods: Capacity and Error Probability Performance

In space-division multiple access (SDMA), different beamforming or space-domain precoding techniques can be applied. We investigate two different space-domain precoding methods, the maximum capacity (MC) and the minimum mean square error (MMSE) precoders, for the downlink channel. It is shown that the MMSE precoding, which is practically implementable, can provide a reasonable performance in terms of the capacity and error probability, while the MC precoding is not practical (although it is optimum in terms of the capacity). Space-domain precoding methods are also applied to code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems.This work was supported by the HY-SDR Research Center at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea, under the ITRC Program of MIC, Korea.Jinho Choi was born in Seoul, Korea. He recieved the B.E. degree (magna cum laude) in electronics engineering from Sogang University in 1989 and the M.S.E. and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1991 and 1994, respectively. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications,University of New South Wales, Australia. Dr. Choi received the 1999 Best Paper Award of Signal Processing from EURASIP.Seungwon Choi received the B.S. degree from Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea, in 1980 and the M.S. degree from Seoul National University, Seoul, in 1982, both the electronic engineering. He received the M.S. degree in computer engineering in 1985 and the Ph.D degree in electrical engineering in 1988 from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.From 1982 to 1984, he was with LG Electronics Co. Ltd., Seoul, where he helped developed the 8-mm camcorder system. From 1988 to 1989, he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Syracuse University, as an Assistant Professor. In 1989, he joined the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, daejeon, Korea, where he developed the adaptive algorithm for real-time application in secure telephone systems. From 1990 to 1992, he was with yhe Communication Research Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan, as a science and Technology Agency Fellow, developing adaptive antenna array system and adaptive equalizing filters for applications in land-mobile communications. He joined Hanyang University, Seoul, in 1992 as an Assistant Professor. He is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hanyang University. His research interests include digital communications and adaptive signal processing with a recent focus on the real-time implementation of smart antenna system for 3G mobile communication system.     

Cycle-Accurate Energy Measurement and Characterization of FPGAs

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) play many important roles, ranging from small glue logic replacement to System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. Nevertheless, FPGA vendors cannot accurately specify the power consumption of their products on device data sheets because the power consumption of FPGAs is strongly dependent on the target circuit, including resource utilization, logic partitioning, mapping, placement and routing. Although major CAD tools have started to report average power consumption under given transition activities, power-efficient FPGA design demands more detailed information about power consumption. In this paper, we introduce an in-house cycle-accurate FPGA energy measurement tool and energy characterization schemes spanning low-level to high-level design. This tool offers all the capabilities necessary to investigate the energy consumption of FPGAs for operation-based energy characterization, which is applicable to high-level and system-wide energy estimation. It also includes features for low-level energy characterization. We compare our tool with Xilinx XPower and demonstrate the state-machine-based energy characterization of an SDRAM controller.The RIACT at Seoul National University provide research facilities for this study. This work was partly supported by the Brain Korea 21 Project.Hyung Gyu Lee received the B.S. degree in Dept. of Computer Engineering from DongGuk University, in 1999, M.S. degree in School of Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 2001, and is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at Seoul National University. His research interests include device-level energy measurement and characterization, system-level low power design and low-power FPGA design.KyungSoo Lee is a M.S. student at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University. He received the B.S. degree in the School of Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 2004. He is currently working on low-power systems and embedded systems for his M.S. degree.Yongseok Choi received the B.S. and M.S. degree in the School of Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 2000 and 2002, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University. His research interests include embedded systems and low power systems.Naehyuck Chang received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees all from Dept. of Control and Instrumentation Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1989, 1992 and 1996, respectively. Since 1997, he has been with School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University and currently is an Associate Professor. His research interest includes system-level low-power design and embedded systems design.     

Markov model of link connectivity in mobile ad hoc networks

This paper proposes a Markov model of link connectivity for mobile ad hoc networks. Under a random behavior, the model provides a unified approach to describe many different mobility models including entity mobility models and group mobility models. Using the model, we can predict the time dependence of link connectivity, and estimate a settling time for which node movements are considered in a transient state. We verify the model with the simulation results of four different mobility models using a global connectivity and a link duration distribution. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CCF-0514975. Seok K. Hwang received the B.S. degree in Control and Instrumentation Engineering from Korea University, Korea in 1998. He received the M.S. degreeand the Ph.D.degree in Electrical Engineering at POSTECH, Korea in 2000 and 2006, respectively.His research interests include intelligence controls and computational intelligence for multi-objective optimization problems. He is working on multimedia communication as a senior researcher at Korea Telecom since 2006. Dongsoo Stephen Kim received the B.S. degree from Korean University in 1987, the M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Texas in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1998. During 1986–2002, he was a Research Associate at Electronic and Telecommunication Research Institute, Taejon, Korea. In 1998–2000, he was a project manager at Megaxess Inc., Germantown, Maryland. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI in 2000. His current research interests include mobile wireless networks, mobility modeling, traffic modeling, and performance evaluation of communication networks.     

A Location Management Scheme Using Direction Characteristics of Mobile Terminals in Mobile Communication Networks

Recently, as the number of mobile terminals (or users) keeps explosively increasing, the location management to track the mobile terminals in mobile communication networks is becoming more important. However, previous schemes have used static location information without any consideration about the moving direction of a mobile terminal. For a fixed paging area, this results in unnecessary pagings, thus increasing the location management cost. In this paper, we propose a new location management scheme using the direction characteristics of a mobile terminal. The direction vector is defined to represent the moving direction of a mobile terminal and to compute a distance from the cell where a location update occurs to the current cell. The offset operation of direction vectors is also presented to represent the position of a mobile terminal in a paging area. This allows the mobile terminal to determine whether a location update will be performed or not. The mobile terminal can also vary its own paging area dynamically according to its moving direction whenever it moves across its paging area. In addition, we develop an analytical model for the proposed scheme which captures the direction characteristics of a mobile terminal based on the Markov model. Analytical results show that the proposed scheme can reduce location management cost by forming a dynamic paging area along the moving direction of a mobile terminal when compared to other schemes.Ui-Sung Song received his B.S and M.S. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Korea in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering from Korea University. Also, he is currently a researcher in the Research Institute of Computer Science and Engineering Technology at Korea University. His research interests include mobile IP, PCS networks, and ad-hoc networks.Joon-Min Gil received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Korea University, Chochiwon, Korea in 1994 and 1996, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Korea in 2000. From 2001 to 2002, he was a visiting research associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, U.S.A. He is currently a senior research engineer in Supercomputing Center at Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information, Daejeon, Korea. His recent research interests include distributed and mobile computing, wireless networks, Internet computing, P2P networks, and grid computing.Chong-Sun Hwang received his M.S. degree in Mathematics from Korea University, Seoul, Korea in 1970, and his Ph.D. degree in Statistics and Computer Science from the University of Georgia in 1978. From 1978 to 1980, he was an assistant professor at South Carolina Lander State University. He is currently a full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Korea University, Seoul, Korea. Since 2004, he has been a Dean in the College of Information and Communications at Korea University. His research interests include distributed systems,distributed algorithm, and mobile computing systems     

Frequency Insertion Strategy for Channel Assignment Problem

This paper presents a new heuristic method for quickly finding a good feasible solution to the channel assignment problem (CAP). Like many other greedy-type heuristics for CAP, the proposed method also assigns a frequency to a call, one at a time. Hence, the method requires computational time that increases only linear to the number of calls. However, what distinguishes the method from others is that it starts with a narrow enough frequency band so as to provoke violations of constraints that we need to comply with in order to avoid radio interference. Each violation is then resolved by inserting frequencies at the most appropriate positions so that the band of frequencies expands minimally. An extensive computational experiment using a set of randomly generated problems as well as the Philadelphia benchmark instances shows that the proposed method perform statistically better than existing methods of its kind and even yields optimum solutions to most of Philadelphia benchmark instances among which two cases are reported for the first time ever, in this paper. Won-Young Shin was born in Busan, Korea in 1978. He received B.S. in industrial engineering from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in 2001 and M.S in operation research and applied statistics from POSTECH in 2003. Since 2003 he has been a researcher of Agency for Defense Development (ADD) in Korea. He is interested in optimization of communication system and applied statistics. Soo Y. Chang is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea. He teaches linear programming, discrete optimization, network flows and operations research courses. His research interests include mathematical programming and scheduling. He has published in several journals including Discrete Applied Mathematics, Computers and Mathematics with Application, IIE Transactions, International Journal of Production Research, and so on. He is a member of Korean IIE, and ORMSS. Jaewook Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics with honors from Seoul National University, and the Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in applied mathematics in 1993 and 1999, respectively. He is currently an assistant professor in the department of industrial engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). His research interests include nonlinear systems, neural networks, nonlinear optimization, and their applications to data mining and financial engineering. Chi-Hyuck Jun was born in Seoul, Korea in 1954. He received B.S. in mineral and petroleum engineering from Seoul National University in 1977, M.S. in industrial engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1979 and Ph.D. in operations research from University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Since 1987 he has been with the department of industrial engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and he is now a professor and the department head. He is interested in performance analysis of communication and production systems. He has published in several journals including IIE Transactions, IEEE Transactions, Queueing Systems and Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems. He is a member of IEEE, INFORMS and ASQ.     

Implementation of a Wireless Multimedia DSP Chip for Mobile Applications

This paper presents the implementation of a wireless multimedia DSP chip for mobile applications. The implemented DSP chip supports communication instructions for Viterbi, timing synchronization, etc. as well as multimedia instructions. The DSP can handle variable length data and perform four MACs in a cycle. The proposed DSP employs parallel processing techniques, such as SIMD, vector processing, DSP schemes and adopts low power features for wireless applications. The implemented DSP chip includes test circuits and various peripherals, such as DMA, bus arbitration, timer, etc. This chip has been modeled by Verilog HDL and implemented using the 0.35 m HCB60 library. The total gate count excluding memory is about 170,000 gates and the clock frequency is 100 MHz.Junghoo Lee received the B.S. degree in electronic engineering from Ajou University, Suwon, Korea in 2002. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree with School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ajou University. His main research interests include SOC design and application-specific DSP chip design.Myung H. Sunwoo received the B.S. degree in electronic engineering from the Sogang University in 1980, the M.S. degree in electrical and electronics from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1982, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990.He worked for Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Daejeon, Korea from 1982 to 1985 and Digital Signal Processor Operations, Motorola, Austin, TX from 1990 to 1992. Since 1992, he has been a Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ajou University in Suwon, Korea. In 2000, he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University of California, Davis, CA. He is the Director of the National Research Laboratory sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology. His research interests include VLSI architectures, SOC design for multimedia and communications, and application-specific DSP architectures.Dr. Sunwoo has published more than 120 papers in international transactions/journals and conferences and also has 28 patents including five U.S. patents. He served as a Technical Program Chair of the IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SIPS) in 2003 and a member of the technical program committee of various international conferences. He has received a number of research awards from the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy, Samsung Electronics, and professional foundations. He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems (2002–2003) and as a Guest Editor for the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing (Kluwer, 2004). Currently, He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Chair of the IEEE CAS Society of the Seoul Chapter.     

An Efficient Dictionary Organization for Maximum Diagnosis

The major problem of fault diagnosis with a fault dictionary is the enormous amount of data. The technique used to manage this data can have a significant effect on the outcome of the fault diagnosis procedure. If information is removed from a fault dictionary in order to reduce the size of the dictionary, its ability to diagnose stuck-at faults and unmodeled faults may be severely debased. Therefore, we focus on methods for producing a dictionary that is both small and lossless-compacted. We propose an efficient dictionary for maximum diagnosis, which is called SD-Dictionary. This dictionary consists of a static sub-dictionary and a dynamic sub-dictionary in order to make a smaller dictionary while maintaining the critical information needed for the diagnostic ability. Experimental results on ISCAS’ 85, ISCAS’ 89 and ITC’ 99 benchmark circuits show that the size of the proposed dictionary is substantially reduced, while the dictionary retains most or all of the diagnostic capability of the full dictionary. This work was supported by the “System IC 2010” project of Korea Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy. Editor: Y. Takamatsu Sunghoon Chun received the B.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 2002. He was a Reseach Engineer with ASIC Research Center in Yonsei University. He researched for test methodologies for SoC. He received the M.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Yonsei University in 2005. He is currently working toward Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Yonsei University. His area of interests includes SoC testing, delay testing, fault diagnosis, functional testing for processor based system and test methodologies for signal integrity faults. Sangwook Kim received the B.S., and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 1999, and 2001, respectively. He researched for Digital Signal Processor design and fault diagnosis of VLSI. He is a Research Engineer with SoC Design Group of System IC Division in LG Electronics, Inc. He is currently interested in SoC design for HDTV and design verification. Hong-Sik Kim was born in Seoul, Korea, on April 4, 1973. He received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 1977, 1999, and 2004, respectively. He was a Post-Doctorial Fellow with the Institute of Virginia Technology. He is currently working on System LSI Group in the Samsung Electronics. His current research interest includes design-for-testability, built-in self tests and fault diagnosis. Sungho Kang received the B.S. degree from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He was a Post-Doctorial Fellow with the University of Texas at Austin, a Research Scientist with the Schlumberger Laboratory for Computer Science, Schlumberger Inc., and a Senior Staff Engineer with the Semiconductor Systems Design Technology, Motorola Inc. Since 1994, he has been an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. His current research interests include VLSI design, VLSI CAD and VLSI testing and design for testability.     

A Development Environment for OSA-Based Applications over the Interworked WLAN and Cellular Networks

In this paper, we propose an OSA-based development environment for interworking WLAN and 3G cellular networks. The main goal of our work is to establish and create an environment that can serve as a demonstration of a working network for OSA-based application developers while featuring mobile services over the interworked LAN and 3G cellular networks. The proposed simulating environment has (i) a location update scheme that is used to obtain mobile users' locations and status information over the interworked WLAN and cellular networks, (ii) an instant message gateway (IMG) simulator that is developed to send and receive generic messages over the interworked WLAN and cellular networks, and (iii) a mapping of Parlay APIs onto SIP signaling messages for multiparty call applications over the interworked WLAN and cellular networks. An illustrated OSA-based application that utilizes the corresponding system functions and modules is developed and verified using the proposed simulating environment. Chung-Ming Huang received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University on 1984/6, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University on 1987/12 and 1991/6 respectively. He is currently a professor in Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, R.O.C. He is the director of The Promotion Center for Network Applications and Services, Innovative Communication Education Project, Ministry of Education, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research interests include broadband Internet and applications, wireless and mobile network protocols, ubiquitous computing and communications, and multimedia streaming. Tz-Heng Hsu received the B.S. degree from Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Feng Chia University on 1996/6, and the M.S. degree and Ph.D from Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University on 1998/7 and 2005/7, Taiwan, R.O.C. He is currently a assistant professor in Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Southern Taiwan University of Technology. His research interests are wireless and mobile network protocols, applications over interworked WLAN and cellular networks and communications, and multimedia streaming. Chih-Wen Chao received the B.S. degree from Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University on 2003/6, and the M.S. degree from Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University on 2005/7, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research interests are OSA-based applications and distributed multimedia systems.     

The design and evaluation of an end-to-end handoff management protocol

We introduce an efficient protocol for end-to-end handoff management in heterogeneous wireless IP-based networks. The protocol is based on the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP), and employs a soft-handoff mechanism that uses end-to-end semantics for signaling handoffs and for transmitting control messages. The design goal of this protocol is twofold—first, to reduce the home registration delay, and, second, to eliminate the tunnelling cost which exists in current proposals, such as Mobile IP and its derivatives. Furthermore, we propose successive enhancements to the initial mobility management framework for achieving better scalability. We present strong analytical and simulation-based results that show performance improvements over existing approaches. Antonios Argyriou is a Ph.D. candidate in the school of electrical and computer engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his M.S. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003, and the diploma from Democritus University of Thrace in 2001, both in electrical and computer engineering. His research interests spawn in all aspects of computer networking while specific interests include wireless networks and multimedia communications. He is a student member of IEEE and ACM. Vijay Madisetti is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He splits his time among teaching, research and entrepreneurship. His interests are design, prototyping, and packaging of electronic systems, virtual prototyping, embedded software systems, and computer networks. He obtained his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the IEEE and the Computer Society.     

A low-power sigma-delta modulator for wireless communication receivers using adaptive biasing circuitry and cascaded comparator scheme

This paper represents the low-power signal-delta (ΣΔ) modulator for wireless communication receiver applications. The 2nd-order modulator has a single-loop structure with 11 quantization levels. An adaptive biasing scheme of the operational amplifier and cascaded comparator scheme are proposed in order to save the power consumption. The DAC with three-level references including the analog ground voltage can make the modulator be implemented with half of the input capacitances without degradation of linearity characteristics with the help of dynamic element matching technique. Peak SNR values of 74 dB and 68 dB are achieved with the input bandwidths of 615 kHz and 1.92 MHz for CDMA-2000 and WCDMA applications, respectively. The modulator is fabricated in a 0.13-μm standard digital CMOS technology and dissipates 4.3 mA for a single supply voltage of 2.8 V. Jinup Lim was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1973. He received the B.S. and the M.S. degrees in semiconductor engineering from University of Seoul, Seoul, Korea, in 1999 and 2001, respectively. From 2001 to 2002, he worked in GCT Semiconductor Inc., Seoul, Korea. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the same university. He received the Best student paper award from IEEE SSCS/EDS Seoul Chapter in 2004 and the Samsung Best paper award third prize in ISOCC 2004. His research area is the design of high-performance discrete-time / continuous-time sigma-delta modulator circuits. Joongho Choi was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1964. He received the B.S. and the M.S. degrees in electronics engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1987 and 1989, respectively. In 1993, he received Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Southern California, CA, USA. From 1994 to 1996, he worked in IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA. In 1996, he joined the University of Seoul, Seoul, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. His research area is the design of high-performance analog integrated circuits.     

A Fault-Tolerant Scheme for Mobility Management in PCS Networks

One of the most important and challenging issues in the design of personal communication service (PCS) systems is the management of location information. In this paper, we propose a new fault-tolerant location management scheme, which is based on the cellular quorum system. Due to quorum's salient set property, our scheme can tolerate the failures of one or more location server(s) without adding or changing the hardware of the systems in the two-tier networks. Meanwhile, with a region-based approach, our scheme stores/retrieves the MH location information in the location servers of a quorum set of the local region as much as possible to avoid long delays caused by the possible long-distance of VLR and HLR. Thus, it yields better connection establishment and update delay. Ming-Jeng Yang received the M.S. degree in computer science from the Syracuse University, New York, in 1991, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan, in 2004. He is an associate professor in the Department of Information Technology, Takming College, Taiwan. His research interests include wireless networks, mobile computing, fault-tolerant computing, and distributed computing. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM. Yao-Ming Yeh received the B.S. degree in computer engineering from National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan, in 1981, and the M.S. degree in computer science and information engineering from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, in 1983. In August 1991, he received the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, Pa., U.S.A. He is a professor in the Department of Information and Computer Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. His research interests include fault-tolerant computing, web and XML computing, and distributed computing.     

Memory Performance Optimizations For Real-Time Software HDTV Decoding

Pure software HDTV video decoding is still a challenging task on entry-level to mid-range desktop and notebook PCs, even with today’s microprocessors frequency measured in GHz. This paper shows that the performance bottleneck in a software MPEG-2 decoder has been shifted to memory operations, as microprocessor technologies including multimedia instruction extensions have been improving at a fast rate during the past years.Our study exploits concurrencies at macroblock level to alleviate the performance bottleneck in a software MPEG-2 decoder. First, the paper introduces an interleaved block-order data layout to improve CPU cache performance. Second, the paper describes an algorithm to explicitly prefetch macroblocks for motion compensation. Finally, the paper presents an algorithm to schedule interleaved decoding and output at macroblock level. Our implementation and experiments show that these methods can effectively hide the latency of memory and frame buffer. The optimizations improve the performance of a multimedia-instruction-optimized software MPEG-2 decoder by a factor of about two. On a PC with a 933 MHz Pentium III CPU, the decoder can decode and display 1280 × 720-resolution HDTV streams at over 62 frames per second.This work was done while the author was a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer ScienceHan Chen is a research staff member in IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His research interests include distributed computing systems, scalable display system, and multimedia. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2003 and his M.A. degree in 1999 from Princeton University. He received his B.S. degree from Tsinghua University of Beijing, China in 1997.Kai Li is a Charles Fitzmorris professor at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University. His research interests include operating systems, computer architecture, distributed systems, and scalable display systems. He received his Ph.D. degree from Yale University in 1986. Prior to that, he received his M.S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China, Academy of Sciences of China in 1981 and a B.S. degree from Jilin University in China in 1977. He was a visiting faculty member at University of Toronto in 1988 and a visiting professor at Stanford University during his sabbaticals in 1996 and 2000. He has served on dozens of program committees and served as chair or vice chair several times. He has been elected as an ACM fellow in 1998.Bin Wei received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1998 and joined the research community at AT&T Shannon Laboratories since then. His research interests are in the areas of high-performance computer systems, multimedia, and service platforms for mobile users. He received a BS in Computer Science from Tianjin University, China in 1983 and an MS in Computer Science from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 1989.     

Enhancement of a WLAN-Based Internet Service

A wireless LAN (WLAN)-based Internet service, called NESPOT, of Korea Telecom (KT), the biggest telecommunication and Internet service company in Korea, has been operational since early 2002. As the numbers of subscribers and deployed access points (APs) increase, KT has been endeavoring to improve its service quality as well as the network management. In this paper, we introduce a joint effort between Seoul National University (SNU) and KT to achieve it. We have been addressing two major issues as part of the joint project thus far: (1) a unified WLAN management/maintenance tool; and (2) real-time traffic support enhancement. We present our on-going efforts as well as some preliminary results. Some issues, which need further attention for the future NESPOT service enhancement, are also introduced.The work reported in this paper was financed and supported by KT. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of KT. Youngkyu Choi is an M.S. candidate in the department of electrical engineering at Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea. He received his B.S. with honors in electrical engineering from SNU in 2002. He has a lot of project experiences related with system software development. His current research interests are the design of MAC layer from distributed system to centralized cellular system, resource management in next-generation (4G) cellular system, and mathematical analysis of system performance. He had served in the Korean Army for 3 years from 1998. Sekyu Park is a research staff at the Multimedia & Wireless Networking Lab. (MWNL), Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea. Before joining MWNL in September 2003, he was with MMC Technology, Seoul, Korea as a Research Staff for five years. His current research interests are in the area of wireless/mobile networks and embedded OS. Sunghyun Choi is an assistant professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea. Before joining SNU in September 2002, he was with Philips Research USA, Briarcliff Manor, New York, USA as a Senior Member Research Staff and a project leader for three years. He received his B.S. (summa cum laude) and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and received Ph.D. at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in September, 1999. His current research interests are in the area of wireless/mobile networks with emphasis on the QoS guarantee and adaptation, resource management, wireless LAN and PAN, next-generation mobile networks, data link layer protocols, and connection and mobility management. He authored/coauthored over 45 technical papers and book chapters in the areas of wireless/mobile networks and communications. He is the technical program co-chair for ACM International Workshop on Wireless Mobile Applications and Services on WLAN Hotspots (WMASH’2004). He is currently serving on program committees of a number of leading wireless and networking conferences including IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE GLOBECOM, and IEEE VTC. He is also a guest co-editor for a special issue on “Emerging WLAN Applications and Technologies” of Wiley Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Journal. He is an active participant and contributor of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standardization committee. Dr. Choi was a recipient of the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies Scholarship and the Korean Government Overseas Scholarship during 1997–1999 and 1994–1997, respectively. Go Woon Lee is a researcher at Service Development Laboratory, Korea Telecom (KT), Seoul, Korea. She received her B.S. degrees in computer science and material engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1995. She was with Microsoft Korea R&D Group as a research staff in 1995. She received M.S. degree in information & communication from Kwang-Ju Institute of Science and Technology (K-JIST) in 1998. Her current research interests are in the area of wireless/mobile networks with emphasis on data link layer protocols, remote diagnosis, and wireless service management. Jaehwan Lee is a researcher at Korea Telecom (KT), Seoul, Korea. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul National University (SNU) in 1998 and 2000, respectively. His master’s research was about estimation theory related to Global Positioning System (GPS) and image processing in robot soccer. His current research interest is to analyze and enhance the performance of wireless/mobile networks (IEEE 802.11, sensor networks and mobile ad-hoc networks) regarding QoS, energy-efficiency and high-throughput considering hand-off and inter-networking with heterogeneous networks. Before joining wireless LAN group in KT, he developed the Web-GIS (Geographical Information System) client-server system from 2000 to 2001. Hanwook Jung, Ph.D joined KT in 1985 and got his Ph.D degree with the company finalcial scholarship of KT from 1991 to 1996 at SUNY at Buffalo. His thesis is about “Wireless signal transmission over Fiber by subcarrier multiplexing” which is current heavily utilized for PCS and cellular repeater line. From 1985 to 1991, he had developed a Videotex service which is now known as Hitel. From 1996 to 1999, he developed 26GHz broadband wireless local loop system and contributed to get the license from the government. Since 1999, he has led a business model and service with wireless LAN. The KT Wi-Fi public service, “NESPOT” has 300,000 subscribers and 10,000 public hotspots. In 2003 he was promoted as an assistant vice president leading NESPOT research team to enhance KT’s broadband with 5,000,000 subscribers. His vision regarding next generation communications service is believed to be true by combining the broadband access and wireless technology including WiFi wireless LAN, UWB, and bluetooth in those areas such as wireless home-networking, device-to-device communications, and ubiqutous networking.This revised version was published online in August 2005 with a corrected cover date.     

A State-Space Approach to Multiuser Parameters Estimation Using Central Difference for CDMA Systems

In this paper, it is shown that a state-space model applies to the code-division multiple-access (CDMA) channel, and Central Difference Filter (CDF) produces channel estimates with the minimum mean-square error (MMSE). This result may be used as compare to Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) which used as channel estimator in CDMA system. The main purpose of this paper is to compare robustness of channel estimator for realistic rapidly time-varying Rayleigh fading channels. To overcome the highly nonlinear nature of time delay estimation and also improve the accuracy, consistency and efficiency of channel estimation, an iterative nonlinear filtering algorithm, called the CDF has been applied in the field of CDMA System. The proposed channel estimator has a more near-far resistant property than the conventional Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Thus, it is believed that the proposed estimator can replace well-known filters, such as the EKF. The Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived for the estimator, and simulation result show that it is nearly near-far resistant and clearly outperforms the EKF. Jang Sub Kim was born June 15, 1974, in Yeongdeok, Korea. He received the M.S. degree in school of electrical and computer engineering from Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea. He is currently with the School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, where he was a Ph. D. student since 1999. His research interests include code-division multiple access, channel estimation, position location, and wireless communications. Seokho Yoon (S‘99–M‘1) received the B.S.E. (summa cum laude), M.S.E., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from KAIST, Daejeon, Korea, in 1997, 1999, and 2002, respectively. From April 2002 to June 2002, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and from July 2002 to February 2003, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. In March 2003, he joined the School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. His research interests include spread spectrum systems, mobile communications, detection and estimation theory, and statistical signal processing. Dr. Yoon is a member of the IEEK and KICS. He was the recipient of a Bronze Prize at Samsung Humantech Paper Contest in 2000. Dong-Ryeol Shin (M‘97) was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1957. He received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D degree in electrical engineering from the Sungkyunkwan University in 1980, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1982 and the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992, respectively. During 1992-1994, he had worked for Samsung Data Systems, Ltd., Korea. Since 1994, he has been with network research group at the Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, as a professor. His current research interests include wireless communications and ubiquitous computing.     

Essential Considerations in Implementing the Smart Antenna System for Downlink Beamforming

This paper addresses some essential problems that have to be taken into consideration in implementing the smart antenna base station (SABS) for downlink beamforming. In order to provide proper downlink beamforming as well as uplink beamforming, a pragmatic procedure of automatic calibration is proposed. Through the experimental test, we confirm that the proposed calibration technique has eliminated the problem of the phase differences of the signal path associated with each antenna. Also, in this paper, we first analyze the multipath condition under which the auxiliary pilot becomes indispensable for detecting the data transmitted on the data channel and what happens if the auxiliary pilot is not available. Then, the performance of the downlink beamforming utilizing the auxiliary pilot is analyzed through the computer simulations. Finally, we present a comparison of downlink communications to uplink ones in terms of throughputs available at each of uplink and downlink communications. Weon-Cheol Lee received the B.S, M.S, and Ph.D. degree in Electronic Communication Engineering from Hanyang University, Korea, in 1992, 1994, 2005, respectively. From 1994 to 2000, he was with LG Electronic Inc., where he had worked for developing the digital VCR, digital cable modem, digital TV. Since 2001, he has been a professor with department of information and communications, Yong-in Songdam College, Korea. His research interests include smart antennas, mobile communications beyond the third generation, digital broadcasting technology, and communication signal processing. Dr. Lee also received the Best Research Paper Award and Excellent Research Engineer Award from LG Electronics, respectively. Seungwon Choireceived the BS degree from Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea, and the M.S. degree from Seoul National University, Korea, 1980 and 1982, respectively, both in electronics engineering, the MS degree (computer engineering) in 1985, and the PhD degree (electrical engineering), in 1988, both from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. From 1988 to 1989 he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, as an Assistant Professor. In 1989 he joined the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea. From 1990 to 1992 he was with the Communications Research Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan, as a Science and Technology Agency fellow, developing the adaptive antenna array systems and adaptive equalizing filters. He joined Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea, in 1992 as an assistant professor. He is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Hanyang University. Since 2003, Dr. Choi has been serving as a Vice Chairman and the representative of the ITU region 3 for SDR (Software Defined Radio) Forum and as a Director of the HY-SDR Research Center, MIC, Korea. His research interests include digital communications and adaptive signal processing with a recent focus on the implementation of the smart antenna systems for both mobile communication systems and wireless data systems. Jae-Moung Kim received the BS degree from Hanyang University, Korea in 1974, the MSEE degree from University of Southern California, USA in 1981, and the PhD degree from Yonsei University, Korea in 1987. He was a Vice President of Radio {&} Broadcasting Technology Laboratory and Director of Satellite Communication System Department at Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) from September 1982 to March 2003. Since April of 2003, he has been a Professor in the Graduate School of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Inha University. He is a board member of directors of Korean Institute of Communication Science (KICS), a Vice President of Korea Society of Broadcast Engineers (KOSBE) and a senior member of IEEE. His research background is telecommunication systems modeling and performance analysis of broadband wireless access systems, mobile communications, satellite communications and broadcasting transmission technologies.