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.     

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.     

A 0.25-/spl mu/m CMOS quad-band GSM RF transceiver using an efficient LO frequency plan

This paper describes a single-chip CMOS quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) RF transceiver for GSM/GPRS applications. It is the most important design issue to maximize resource sharing and reuse in designing the multiband transceivers. In particular, reducing the number of voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) required for local oscillator (LO) frequency generation is very important because the VCO and phase-locked loop (PLL) circuits occupy a relatively large area. We propose a quad-band GSM transceiver architecture that employs a direct conversion receiver and an offset PLL transmitter, which requires only one VCO/PLL to generate LO signals by using an efficient LO frequency plan. In the receive path, four separate LNAs are used for each band, and two down-conversion mixers are used, one for the low bands (850/900 MHz) and the other for the high bands (1800/1900 MHz). A receiver baseband circuit is shared for all four bands because all of their channel spaces are the same. In the transmit path, most of the building blocks of the offset PLL, including a TX VCO and IF filters, are integrated. The quad-band GSM transceiver that was implemented in 0.25-/spl mu/m CMOS technology has a size of 3.3/spl times/3.2 mm/sup 2/, including its pad area. From the experimental results, we found that the receiver provides a maximum noise figure of 2.9 dB and a minimum IIP3 of -13.2dBm for the EGSM 900 band. The transmitter shows an rms phase error of 1.4/spl deg/ and meets the GSM spectral mask specification. The prototype chip consumes 56 and 58 mA at 2.8 V in the RX and TX modes, respectively.     

Board-level reliability of Pb-free solder joints of TSOP and various CSPs

To evaluate various Pb-free solder systems for leaded package, thin small outline packages (TSOPs) and chip scale packages (CSPs) including leadframe CSP (LFCSP), fine pitch BGA (FBGA), and wafer level CSP (WLCSP) were characterized in terms of board level and mechanical solder joint reliability. For board level solder joint reliability test of TSOPs, daisy chain samples having pure-Sn were prepared and placed on daisy chain printed circuit board (PCB) with Pb-free solder pastes. For CSPs, the same composition of Pb-free solder balls and solder pastes were used for assembly of daisy chain PCB. The samples were subjected to temperature cycle (T/C) tests (-65/spl deg/C/spl sim/150/spl deg/C, -55/spl deg/C/spl sim/125/spl deg/C, 2 cycles/h). Solder joint lifetime was electrically monitored by resistance measurement and the metallurgical characteristics of solder joint were analyzed by microstructural observation on a cross-section sample. In addition, mechanical tests including shock test, variable frequency vibration test, and four point twisting test were carried out with daisy chain packages too. In order to compare the effect of Pb-free solders with those of Sn-Pb solder, Sn-Pb solder balls and solder paste were included. According to this paper, most Pb-free solder systems were compatible with the conventional Sn-Pb solder with respect to board level and mechanical solder joint reliability. For application of Pb-free solder to WLCSP, Cu diffusion barrier layer is required to block the excessive Cu diffusion, which induced Cu trace failure.     

Adaptive image denoising using scale and space consistency

This paper proposes a new method for image denoising with edge preservation, based on image multiresolution decomposition by a redundant wavelet transform. In our approach, edges are implicitly located and preserved in the wavelet domain, whilst image noise is filtered out. At each resolution level, the image edges are estimated by gradient magnitudes (obtained from the wavelet coefficients), which are modeled probabilistically, and a shrinkage function is assembled based on the model obtained. Joint use of space and scale consistency is applied for better preservation of edges. The shrinkage functions are combined to preserve edges that appear simultaneously at several resolutions, and geometric constraints are applied to preserve edges that are not isolated. The proposed technique produces a filtered version of the original image, where homogeneous regions appear separated by well-defined edges. Possible applications include image presegmentation, and image denoising.     

Visual Cryptography Based on an Interferometric Encryption Technique

This paper presents a new method for a visual cryptography scheme that uses phase masks and an interferometer. To encrypt a binary image, we divided it into an arbitrary number of slides and encrypted them using an XOR process with a random key or keys. The phase mask for each encrypted image was fabricated under the proposed phase‐assignment rule. For decryption, phase masks were placed on any path of the Mach‐Zehnder interferometer. Through optical experiments, we confirmed that a secret binary image that was sliced could be recovered by the proposed method.     

Survivable Load Sharing Protocols: A Simulation Study

The development of robust, survivable wireless access networks requires that the performance of network architectures and protocols be studied under normal as well as faulty conditions where consideration is given to faults occurring within the network as well as within the physical environment. User location, mobility, and usage patterns and the quality of the received radio signal are impacted by terrain, man-made structures, population distribution, and the existing transportation system. The work presented herein has two thrusts. One, we propose the use of overlapping coverage areas and dynamic load balancing as a means to increase network survivability by providing mobiles with multiple access points to the fixed infrastructure. Two, we describe our simulation approach to survivability analysis which combines empirical spatial information, network models, and fault models for more realistic analysis of real service areas. We use our simulation approach to compare the survivability of our load balancing protocols to a reference scheme within two diverse geographic regions. We view survivability as a cost-performance tradeoff using handover activity as a cost metric and blocking probabilities as performance metrics. Our results illustrate this tradeoff for the protocols studied and demonstrate the extent to which the physical environment and faults therein affect the conclusions that are drawn.     

High‐Performance Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Photodetectors Enhanced by Self‐Assembled Monolayer Doping

Most doping research into transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) has been mainly focused on the improvement of electronic device performance. Here, the effect of self‐assembled monolayer (SAM)‐based doping on the performance of WSe₂‐ and MoS₂‐based transistors and photodetectors is investigated. The achieved doping concentrations are ≈1.4 × 10¹¹ for octadecyltrichlorosilane (OTS) p‐doping and ≈10¹¹ for aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) n‐doping (nondegenerate). Using this SAM doping technique, the field‐effect mobility is increased from 32.58 to 168.9 cm² V^?1 s in OTS/WSe₂ transistors and from 28.75 to 142.2 cm² V^?1 s in APTES/MoS₂ transistors. For the photodetectors, the responsivity is improved by a factor of ≈28.2 (from 517.2 to 1.45 × 10⁴ A W^?1) in the OTS/WSe₂ devices and by a factor of ≈26.4 (from 219 to 5.75 × 10³ A W^?1) in the APTES/MoS₂ devices. The enhanced photoresponsivity values are much higher than that of the previously reported TMD photodetectors. The detectivity enhancement is ≈26.6‐fold in the OTS/WSe₂ devices and ≈24.5‐fold in the APTES/MoS₂ devices and is caused by the increased photocurrent and maintained dark current after doping. The optoelectronic performance is also investigated with different optical powers and the air‐exposure times. This doping study performed on TMD devices will play a significant role for optimizing the performance of future TMD‐based electronic/optoelectronic applications.