Current IMT-2000 R&D status and views in Korea

In this article Korean development of IMT-2000 is considered. It includes the second-generation digital mobile communications, R&D and standardization activities related to IMT-2000, and the authors' perspectives on IMT-2000 in Korea. In Korea, there are many activities for development of IMT-2000 radio transmission technologies, and the results of these activities will be the submission of technologies to the ITU. However, the Korean telecommunications standardization body (TTA) will make every effort to make a common global standard for IMT-2000. Therefore, the TTA will make a domestic standard for IMT-2000 after the ITU finalizes the related Recommendations. It seems to the authors that difficulties in harmonization in the TTA are very similar to difficulties in harmonization worldwide. The only way of reaching the harmonization of IMT-2000 in Korea is that the key players should have the view from the end users' seat     

Ice-slurry production using direct contact heat transfer

An ice slurry generation system was developed using direct contact heat transfer between water and the coolant, Fluroinert FC-84. The location of the coolant nozzle is an important design consideration to avoid clogging due to freezing of water. An ice fraction of up to about 40 percent was obtained with the nozzle located at the bottom of the ice slurry tank and the jet directed upwards into the water. Two simplified model were developed to extract the heat transfer coefficient between the coolant drops and the water. The first model requires as input the average drop diameter and the residence time while the second model uses the measured drop diameter distribution. The estimated heat transfer coefficients are much smaller than those computed using single-sphere correlations.     

An Optimized Content-Aware Authentication Scheme for Streaming JPEG-2000 Images Over Lossy Networks

This paper proposes an optimized content-aware authentication scheme for JPEG-2000 streams over lossy networks, where a received packet is consumed only when it is both decodable and authenticated. In a JPEG-2000 codestream, some packets are more important than others in terms of coding dependency and image quality. This naturally motivates allocating more redundant authentication information for the more important packets in order to maximize their probability of authentication and thereby minimize the distortion at the receiver. Towards this goal, with the awareness of its corresponding image content, we formulate an optimization framework to compute an authentication graph to maximize the expected media quality at the receiver, given specific authentication overhead and knowledge of network loss rate. System analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves our design goal in that the rate-distortion (R-D) curve of the authenticated image is very close to the R-D curve when no authentication is required     

Comparison of Markov model and fault tree approach in determining initiating event frequency for systems with two train configurations

This study explores the use of Markov models in some areas of systems analysis in which time evolution of the system may be a significant factor in influencing the system reliability or availability. Comparisons are made between the Markov models and the time-averaged fault tree models for determining support system failure initiating event frequency in a nuclear power plant, for both power and shutdown conditions. Factors affecting consistency between the fault tree approach and the Markov model approach are studied for systems with common two train configurations. A correlation is developed to estimate the ratio between initiator frequencies through both approaches for a two parallel component system. Insights are developed as to when time averaged and simplified fault tree models support a good approximation to the more rigorous time-dependent Markov models.     

Rectilinear steiner tree heuristics and minimum spanning tree algorithms using geographic nearest neighbors

We study the application of the geographic nearest neighbor approach to two problems. The first problem is the construction of an approximately minimum length rectilinear Steiner tree for a set ofn points in the plane. For this problem, we introduce a variation of a subgraph of sizeO(n) used by YaO [31] for constructing minimum spanning trees. Using this subgraph, we improve the running times of the heuristics discussed by Bern [6] fromO(n ² log n) toO(n log² n). The second problem is the construction of a rectilinear minimum spanning tree for a set ofn noncrossing line segments in the plane. We present an optimalO(n logn) algorithm for this problem. The rectilinear minimum spanning tree for a set of points can thus be computed optimally without using the Voronoi diagram. This algorithm can also be extended to obtain a rectilinear minimum spanning tree for a set of nonintersecting simple polygons.The results in this paper are a part of Y. C. Yee's Ph.D. thesis done at SUNY at Albany. He was supported in part by NSF Grants IRI-8703430 and CCR-8805782. S. S. Ravi was supported in part by NSF Grants DCI-86-03318 and CCR-89-05296.     

Effects of ternary additions on the thermoelastic martensitic transformation of NiAl

Nickel-rich β-NiAl alloys, which are potential materials for high-temperature shape-memory alloys, show a thermoelastic martensitic transformation, which produces their shape memory effect. However, the transformation to Ni₅Al₃ phase during heating of NiAl martensite can interrupt the reversible martensitic transformation; consequently, the shape memory effect in NiAl martensite might not appear after heating. The phase transformation process in binary Ni-(34 to 37)Al martensite was investigated by differential thermal analysis (DTA) method, and we found that the condition of reversible martensitic transformation was not the β → Ni₅Al₃ transformation, but rather the M → Ni₅Al₃ transformation occurring at 250 °C to 300 °C. Therefore, the transformation temperature of M → Ni₅Al₃ determined the highest operating temperature for the shape memory effect. For verifying the critical temperature, the phase transformation process was investigated for eight ternary Ni-33Al-X alloys (X=Cu, Co, Fe, Mn, Cr, Ti, Si, and Nb). Only Ti, Si, and Nb additions were found to be effective in dropping the M _s temperature, and they facilitated the shape memory effect in Ni-33Al-X alloys. In particular, the addition of Si and Nb raised the transformation temperature of M → Ni₅Al₃, a potentially beneficial effect for shape memory at higher temperatures. This article is based on a presentation made in the symposium entitled “Fundamentals of Structural Intermetallics,” presented at the 2002 TMS Annual Meeting, February 21–27, 2002, in Seattle, Washington, under the auspices of the ASM and TMS Joint Committee on Mechanical Behavior of Materials.     

Measurements of coupling and reflection characteristics of butt-joints in passive waveguide integrated laser diodes

Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) spectra of passive waveguide integrated lasers have been studied to estimate the coupling efficiency and the reflectivity at the butt-joints between active and passive waveguides. A new method has been proposed for the analysis of ASE to extract the coupling efficiency and reflectivity at the butt-joints. This method was applied experimentally to estimate the coupling and reflection of the passive waveguide integrated lasers with different amounts of vertical misalignments of active and passive waveguides.     

Performance of GaAs-AlGaAs V-grooved inner stripe quantum-well wirelasers with different current blocking configurations

GaAs-AlGaAs V-grooved inner stripe (VIS) quantum-well wire (QWW) lasers grown by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition with different current blocking configurations, n-blocking on p-substrate (VIPS), p-n-p-n blocking on n-substrate (VI(PN)_nS) and p-blocking on n-substrate (VINS) have been fabricated and characterized. The VIPS QWW lasers show the most stable characteristics with effective current confinement: one of the lasers shows fundamental transverse mode, lasing up to 5 mW/facet, typical threshold current of 39.9 mA at 818.5 mm, an external differential quantum efficiency of 24%/facet, and characteristic temperature of 92 K. The current tuning rate was almost linear at 0.031 mm/mA, and the temperature tuning rate was measured to be 0.14 nm/°C. Comparison of the light output versus current characteristics of the lasers with different current blocking configurations is presented here     

Predictive fine granularity successive elimination for fast optimal block-matching motion estimation.

Given the number of checking points, the speed of block motion estimation depends on how fast the block matching is. In this paper, a new framework, fine granularity successive elimination (FGSE), is proposed for fast optimal block matching in motion estimation. The FGSE features providing a sequence of nondecreasing fine-grained boundary levels to reject a checking point using as little computation as possible, where block complexity is utilized to determine the order of partitioning larger sub-blocks into smaller subblocks in the creation of the fine-grained boundary levels. It is shown that the well-known successive elimination algorithm (SEA) and multilevel successive elimination algorithm (MSEA) are just two special cases in the FGSE framework. Moreover, in view that two adjacent checking points (blocks) share most of the block pixels with just one pixel shifting horizontally or vertically, we develop a scheme to predict the rejection level for a candidate by exploiting the correlation of matching errors between two adjacent checking points. The resulting predictive FGSE algorithm can further reduce computation load by skipping some redundant boundary levels. Experimental results are presented to verify substantial computational savings of the proposed algorithm in comparison with the SEA/MSEA.