High-performance Communication Research Articles

Remote monitoring system for ITER PF converter system based on EtherCAT

Abstract This paper describes ITER PF converter system architecture in details. According to its real-time and reliability characteristics, ITER PF converter system uses an industrial Ethernet fieldbus based on EtherCAT protocol with high real-time communication performance to develop its remote monitoring system. This system follows ITER design specification, it realize the real-time monitoring of thousands of analog and digital signals, and can realize remote operation of the switches in the field layer, real-time data and historical data query, event alarm and authority management functions. The system has achieved continuous and stable operation on the test platform of ITER PF converter system, meeting the requirements of high real-time performance and reliability of the remote monitoring system of ITER PF converter system.

Electrooculogram-aided intelligent sensing and high-performance communication control system for massive ALS individuals

Neurodegenerative disease was one of the progressive diseases that affect the brain’s neurons and cause muscle dysfunction. There is a need to focus on these challenges for interfaces to communicate with others. We analyze three categories of subjects from 15 subjects between different age groups from 20 to 55 to investigate the efficiency to promote the human–computer interface using eye activities. Observed signals were estimated with root mean square for 11 tasks and classified with probabilistic neural network. In the experimental analysis, it determines that subjects belonging to young-aged group performance were appreciated and obtained the average mean classification accuracy of 94.00%, the subjects belonging to old-aged group performance were medium and obtained the average mean classification accuracy of 93.27%, and subjects belonging to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) performance were low and obtained the average mean classification accuracy of 90.37%. The study examined that young-aged subjects’ performance was marginally high compared with the other two categories of subjects. Our study concluded that first maximum performances were obtained for young-aged subjects and secondary performance was attained for old-aged subjects, and ALS subjects obtained minimum performance compared to other subjects who participated in this analysis. Finally, our study concluded that designing intelligent sensing and high-performance communication control systems for massive ALS-affected subjects was minimal. They also need more training than other categories of subjects in this experiment.

JCR70: A Low-Complexity Millimeter-Wave Proof-of-Concept Platform for a Fully-Digital SIMO Joint Communication-Radar

A fully-digital wideband joint communication-radar (JCR) with a single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) architecture at the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band will enable high joint communication and radar performance with enhanced design flexibility. A quantized receiver with few-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) will enable a practical JCR solution with reduced power consumption for futuristic portable devices and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present a joint communication-radar proof-of-concept platform, named JCR70, to evaluate and demonstrate the performance of these JCR systems using real channel measurements in the 71–76 GHz band. We develop this platform by extending a mmWave communication set-up with an additional full-duplex radar receiver and by capturing the SIMO JCR channel using a moving antenna on a sliding rail. To characterize the JCR performance of our developed testbed, we conduct several indoor and outdoor experiments and apply traditional as well as advanced processing algorithms on the measured data. The experimental results show that the quantized receiver with 2–4 b ADCs generally performs quite close to the high-resolution ADC for a signal-to-noise ratio of up to 5 dB. Additionally, we compare the performance of our JCR70 platform with the INRAS Radarbook, which is a state-of-the-art automotive radar evaluation platform at 77 GHz.

Brain2Char: a deep architecture for decoding text from brain recordings

Objective. Decoding language representations directly from the brain can enable new brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) for high bandwidth human–human and human–machine communication. Clinically, such technologies can restore communication in people with neurological conditions affecting their ability to speak. Approach. In this study, we propose a novel deep network architecture Brain2Char, for directly decoding text (specifically character sequences) from direct brain recordings (called electrocorticography, ECoG). Brain2Char framework combines state-of-the-art deep learning modules—3D Inception layers for multiband spatiotemporal feature extraction from neural data and bidirectional recurrent layers, dilated convolution layers followed by language model weighted beam search to decode character sequences, and optimizing a connectionist temporal classification loss. Additionally, given the highly non-linear transformations that underlie the conversion of cortical function to character sequences, we perform regularizations on the network’s latent representations motivated by insights into cortical encoding of speech production and artifactual aspects specific to ECoG data acquisition. To do this, we impose auxiliary losses on latent representations for articulatory movements, speech acoustics and session specific non-linearities. Main results. In three (out of four) participants reported here, Brain2Char achieves 10.6%, 8.5%, and 7.0% word error rates respectively on vocabulary sizes ranging from 1200 to 1900 words. Significance. These results establish a new end-to-end approach on decoding text from brain signals and demonstrate the potential of Brain2Char as a high-performance communication BCI.

A Scalable Buffer Queue Sizing Algorithm for Latency Insensitive Systems

Timing violations in high performance communication channels in system-on-chips (SoC) may occur in the late stages of the physical design process. To address that, latency insensitive systems (LISs) employ pipelining in the communication channels through the insertion of relay stations. Although the functionality of an LIS is robust with respect to the communication latencies, imbalances in relay station insertion may degrade the throughput of the system. While having a large number of buffer queues can eliminate such performance loss, the system may not have adequate area to accommodate these buffers. The problem of buffer queue sizing for maximizing throughput while meeting buffer area constraints has been solved using a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) formulation; however, such an approach is not scalable. In this work, we formulate the buffer queue sizing problem as a parameterized graph optimization problem where for every communication channel there is a parameterized edge with buffer counts as the edge weight. We then use a minimum cycle mean algorithm to determine from which edges buffers can be removed safely. Experimental results on large LISs suggest that the proposed approach is scalable. Moreover, quality of the solutions, in terms of the throughput and the size of buffer queues, is observed to be as good as that of the MILP-based approach.

Guest Editorial Introduction to the Special Section on Cognitive Software Defined Networks and Applications

The papers in this special section focus on cognitive software defined networks and applications. Next generation networks (NGNs) are xpected to utilize internal and external sources of data through information and wireless communication techniques. Particularly, the demand for autonomic network management, orchestrations and optimization is as intense as ever, even though significant research has been needed. Software Defined Networks (SDNs) have been proposed to address QoS requirements for NGNs including high throughput, high mobility, low latency, heterogeneity and scalability. SDN has improved the user experience by providing high-performance communications between the network nodes, reconstructing the network structure, and optimizing the networking coverage, system security, communication latency, etc. The control intelligence is moved out of devices in a logically centralized controller, which interacts with data plane devices through standard interfaces. However, the existing applications in the SDN attract more attention to develop new learning algorithms, enhanced protocols and is even used in sensor power line communication for data transmission. The Cognitive Learning algorithms are the best solution to some particular applications. The cognitive software defined network (CSDN) presents to combine the efficiencies of SDN with new cognitive learning algorithms and enhanced protocols to automatize SDN. Its research and implementation are based on autonomic network management and control concepts. Such a combination of SDNs with autonomic frameworks and cognitive algorithms is better to solve the issues of traditional SDNs. This architecture of CSDN enables up-to-date control schemes to be developed and deployed to enable new smart networking services.

When to Realign the Receive Beam in High Mobility V2X Communications?

This paper studies a receive directional beam control method in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) wireless communication system. First, we reveal that for a given receive beam, the channel coherence time of fast varying vehicle channels decreases as time goes by. Then, we propose a novel adaptive receive beam control method termed dynamic beam management (DBM), tailored to this channel characteristic, which adaptively selects one of two predefined actions, i.e., channel estimation and beam alignment. The channel estimation is a process of reacquiring channel state information using known pilot signals for coherent detection toward a given receive beam direction. The beam alignment is a kind of analog beam selection method, which steers the direction of the receive beam to attain higher communication performance. Since the beam alignment must search through large dimension, it costs more time compared to the channel estimation. Therefore, given different time overheads of channel estimation and beam alignment, new design criteria are required to decide when each action should be conducted in V2X communications. The proposed DBM figures out the time point when to re-estimate the channel and to realign the receive beam, taking into account their gains and overheads. Furthermore, we show that although a narrow beam has a merit of high power gain, too narrow beam is vulnerable to the pointing error, and reduces channel coherence time, and thus we numerically find the optimal receive beamwidth. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed DBM are underpinned by both analytic and simulation results.

Design and Performance Evaluation of Multidimensional OFDM System

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has many advantages, and thus has been applied to various communication systems. However, new next-generation communication systems require higher communication performance and spectral efficiency, and further studies are required to improve OFDM. Many attempts have been made to three-dimensional OFDM (3D-OFDM) in an attempt to improve OFDM. 3D-OFDM expands OFDM into three dimensions to map symbols, thereby improving communication performance, but has limitations in terms of spectral efficiency. In this paper, we present a multidimensional OFDM (MD-OFDM) system that is expanded from 3D-OFDM and evaluate its performance. Simulation results show that symbol error rate performance can be further improved when OFDM is expanded into MD-OFDM, but spectral efficiency is not improved. However, since the Euclidean distance between adjacent symbols increases with multidimensional expansion, trellis-based channel coding could be used to improve system performance and spectral efficiency. Further research is needed on these characteristics.

Y-00 Quantum-Noise Randomized Stream Cipher Using Intensity Modulation Signals for Physical Layer Security of Optical Communications

The Internet plays an essential role in modern societies and in the amount of sensitive data transported over the optical networks that shows its' importance has increased drastically. Therefore, it is critical to develop data protection schemes for optical fiber communications to provide user security. The Y-00 quantum-noise randomized stream cipher that employs extremely high-order modulation and restricts an attacker's interception of ciphertext is a practical candidate for providing data protection. In this article, we introduce the operation principle of the Y-00 cipher with respect to data encryption and decryption. The Y-00 cipher combines the mathematical encryption of multi-level signaling and physical randomness, and provides a high level of security to the physical layer of optical communications and a high communication performance. We also present the noise masking phenomenon of the Y-00 cipher with intensity modulation (IM). This noise masking is generated by shot noise, i.e., quantum noise and additive noise such as amplified spontaneous emission noise. The noise masking phenomenon fails an attacker's interception of the ciphertext. The secrecy of the IM Y-00 cipher is also discussed, and an approximate analytical solution is introduced for evaluating the probability of the attackers accurately guessing the ciphertext. Finally, the secrecy of a 1,000-km transmission system is experimentally demonstrated with the Y-00 cipher transceiver at data rate of 1.5-Gb/s using the derived analytical solution to deduce the high secrecy of the entire transmission system.

A Survey of Silicon Photonics for Energy-Efficient Manycore Computing

Silicon photonics is an emerging paradigm for designing energy -efficient and high-performance communication backbone for manycore chips. This article presents a survey about designing photonic on-chip infrastructure.

Microfabrication of a Monolithic Air-Filled Half-Mode Waveguide for Millimeter-Wave Applications

This letter presents the first successful on-wafer fabrication and characterization of a fully monolithic air-filled half-mode waveguide (HMWG) for millimeter waves. Utilizing a flexible microfabrication process, a thick sacrificial layer is employed to build and then release 3-D structures on-wafer. The measured prototype achieves an attenuation of 0.31 dB/mm at 85 GHz, while miniaturizing the footprint of the conventional waveguide by 56%. The proposed concept highlights the potential of monolithic HMWGs for enhanced integration technology suitable for high-performance millimeter-wave 5G communication systems.

HPPT-NoC: A Dark-Silicon Inspired Hierarchical TDM NoC with Efficient Power-Performance Trading

Networks-on-chip (NoCs) acquired substantial advancements as the typical solution for a modular, flexible and high performance communication infrastructure coping with the scalable Multi-/Manycores technology. However, the increasing chip complexity heading towards thousand cores, together with the approaching dark-silicon era, puts energy efficiency as an integral design key for future NoC-based multicores, where NoCs are significantly contributing to the total chip power. In this paper, we propose HPPT-NoC, a dark-silicon inspired energy-efficient hierarchical TDM NoC with online distributed setup-scheme. The proposed network makes use of the dim silicon parts of the chip to hierarchically connect quad-routers units. Normal routers operate at full-chip-frequency at high supply level, and hierarchical routers operate at half-chip-frequency and lower supply voltage with adequate synchronization. Routers follow a proposed TDM architecture that separates the datapath from the control-setup planes. This allows separate clocking and operating supplies between data and control and to keep the control-setup as a single-slot-cycle design independent of the datapath slot size. The proposed NoC architecture is evaluated versus a base NoC from the state-of-the-art in terms of performance and hardware results using Synopsys VCS and Synopsys Design Compiler for SAED90nm and SAED32nm technologies. The obtained results highlight the power-frequency-trading feature supported by the proposed hierarchical NoC through the configurable data-control clock relation and maintained over the different technology nodes. With the same power budget of the base NoC, the proposed architecture provides up to 74% setup latency enhancement, 32% increased NoC saturation load, and 21% higher success rates, offering up to 78% improved power delay product. On the other hand, with 38% power savings, the proposed NoC provides up to 37% enhanced latency and 15% higher success rates, with 72% enhanced power delay product. The proposed design consumes almost double the area of the base NoC, however with an average of 56% under-clocked (dim) silicon area operating at half to quarter the maximum chip frequency. This results in reduced power density as a main concern in the dark-silicon era down to 24% of the base NoC.

Об использовании федеральной научной телекоммуникационной инфраструктуры для суперкомпьютерных вычислений

The article is devoted to the prospects for the development of scientific telecommunications infrastructure based on the new generation national research computer network (NRCN), formed by the integration of departmental scientific and educational networks RUNNet and RASNet. The new network\prime capabilities for combining supercomputer resources and providing barrier-free access to them are shown. Based on the generalized world experience, it has been shown that supercomputer infrastructures have special requirements for a telecommunication network for data transmission and the presence of a number of additional services. These requirements go far beyond the services of commercial telecom providers and, as a rule, can only be satisfied by the combined efforts of national scientific and educational networks. The key elements of the federal telecommunications infrastructure necessary for combining high-performance computing resources are considered: high-performance communication channels with a specified quality of service, their automatic allocation on demand and on schedule, trusted network environment, federated authentication and authorization, reliability and security, end-to-end monitoring of the data transmission path between end users. Based on the analysis of the life cycle of the supercomputer job migrating at the distributed network, the requirements for the NRCN telecommunications infrastructure and services based on it are formulated.

Grain growth and tunable ferromagnetic resonance linewidth of low-temperature sintering NiCuZn gyromagnetic ferrites

NiCuZn (NCT) ferrites-based ceramics material have received significant attention for good gyromagnetic properties in recent years. Densification and ferromagnetic resonance linewidth play a critical role in modern system including circulators, phase shifters. However, there are still technological challenges associated with its application to achieve high-performance communication system. In this work, we have carried out a analysis of the influence of sintering temperature and time on the dependent structural, tunable gyromagnetic properties of NCZ ferrites. SEM results found that a direct consequence of varying the sintering temperature and time to be on the variation in the grain size, thus adjusting the ferromagnetic resonance linewidth of NCZ ferrites. We also found that sufficient grain growth is adversely affect ferromagnetic resonance linewidth. Finally, uniform and compact NCZ gyromagnetic ferrites were successfully synthesized at a low temperature (~ 880 °C for 3 h). The fine microstructure of NCZ ferrites sintered at 880 °C for 3 h also possessed excellent gyromagnetic properties (high 4πMs≈ 3400.29 Gauss, and low ΔH ≈ 158.39 Oe). It was indicated that this greatly low ferromagnetic resonance linewidth of NiCuZn ferrites can be utilized for new generation high-performance microwave devices.

A Brain Computer Interface based Communication System using SSVEP and EOG

This study aims to design a high performance communication system using steady state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) and electro-oculogram (EOG) signal. The proposed keyboard system consists of twenty three randomly chosen characters and they were indexed into different flickering visual stimuli designed using three SSVEP stimulus frequencies. The same frequency valued visual stimuli were used many times (more than once) in the keyboard layout. In this approach an oddball paradigm is introduced and it randomly highlights three/two unique frequency valued visual stimuli at a time. The system identifies a desired target by user eye blink in accordance to the oddball paradigm and recognized SSVEP frequency value. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the real time SSVEP electroencephalogram signal gets increased by the introduction of oddball paradigm in the SSVEP based keyboard system. The paradigm will increase the subject’s attention and concentration on the flickering target stimulus. The real time SSVEP data were classified using extended multivariate synchronization index (EMSI) method. The thresholding method is used for single blink detection. The offline and online experiments were performed by all the subjects for evaluating the proposed communication system. The average classification accuracy and information transfer rate of the system are 96.73 % and 76.02 bits/min respectively.

Donald A. B. Lindberg (1933-2019).

Visionary medical informaticist who laid the groundwork for PubMed

RFID Double-Loop Tags with Novel Meandering Lines Design for Health Monitoring Application

In this paper, we propose a design of two compact and miniaturized RFID epidermal tags in the UHF band for health monitoring applications. The two conceptions of meandered double-loop antennas with T-match configuration, namely, a double-loop antenna with meandered line in the horizontal direction and a double-loop antenna with meandered lines in two directions, are placed at very close distance from the human body. The proposed tags are composed of bio-silicone substrate, to protect the human skin from the electromagnetic waves, and a copper conductor loaded by T-match configuration, to suit the complex impedance of the antenna to that of the chip. We have performed numerical simulations of these conceptions of two tags using the HFSS and CST solvers. Our results show two optimal sizes with a high communication performance, good matching features, and a large read range. We placed afterwards these two optimized tags in an elliptical environment to test their flexibility and examine their performance on different parts of the human body.

Reliable Design for a Network of Networks with Inspiration from Brain Functional Networks

In realizing the network environment assumed by the Internet-of-Things, network slicing has drawn considerable attention as a way to enhance the utilization of physical networks (PNs). Meanwhile, slicing has been shown to cause interdependence among sliced virtual networks (VNs) by propagating traffic fluctuations from one network to others. However, for interconnected networks with mutual dependencies, known as a network of networks (NoN), finding a reliable design method that can cope with environmental changes is an important issue that is yet to be addressed. Some NoN models exist that describe the behavior of interdependent networks in complex systems, and previous studies have shown that an NoN model based on the functional networks of the brain can achieve high robustness, but its application to dynamic and practical systems is yet to be considered. Consequently, this paper proposes the Physical–Virtual NoN (PV-NoN) model assuming a network-slicing environment. This model defines an NoN availability state to deal with traffic fluctuations and interdependence among a PN and VNs. Further, we assume three basic types of interdependence among VNs for this model. Simulation experiments confirm that the one applying complementary interdependence inspired by brain functional networks achieves high availability and communication performance while preventing interference among the VNs. Also investigated is a method for designing a reliable network structure for the PV-NoN model. To this end, the deployment of network influencers (i.e., the most influential elements over the entire network) is configured from the perspective of intra/internetwork assortativity. Simulation experiments confirm that availability or communication performance is improved when each VN is formed assortatively or disassortatively, respectively. Regarding internetwork assortativity, both the availability and communication performance are improved when the influencers are deployed disassortatively among the VNs.

Analysis of Industrial Ethernet used in Active Surface System of QTT

Industrial Ethernet is widely used in automation and control system because of its high reliability and good communication performance. There are several protocols for Industry Ethernet. In different applications, it is necessary to select a appropriate protocol standard according to different needs. In order to apply industrial Ethernet in the active surface system of QTT, the control network requirements of active surface system were summarized. The period and jitter of three protocol standards, Ethernet/IP, Profinet RT and EtherCAT, were tested by evaluation hardware. The differences between network configuration and ring redundancy settings are analyzed. The results show that EtherCAT is more suitable for the network application requirements of active surface system of QTT.

Energy Efficient Chip-to-Chip Wireless Interconnection for Heterogeneous Architectures

Heterogeneous multichip architectures have gained significant interest in high-performance computing clusters to cater to a wide range of applications. In particular, heterogeneous systems with multiple multicore CPUs, GPUs, and memory have become common to meet application requirements. The shared resources like interconnection network in such systems pose significant challenges due to the diverse traffic requirements of CPUs and GPUs. Especially, the performance and energy consumption of inter-chip communication have remained a major bottleneck due to limitations imposed by off-chip wired links. To overcome these challenges, we propose a wireless interconnection network to provide energy-efficient, high-performance communication in heterogeneous multi-chip systems. Interference-free communication between GPUs and memory modules is achieved through directional wireless links, while omnidirectional wireless interfaces connect cores in the CPUs with other components in the system. Besides providing low-energy, high-bandwidth inter-chip communication, the wireless interconnection scales efficiently with system size to provide high performance across multiple chips. The proposed inter-chip wireless interconnection is evaluated on two system sizes with multiple CPU and multiple GPU chips, along with main memory modules. On a system with 4 CPU and 4 GPU chips, application runtime is sped up by 3.94×, packet energy is reduced by 94.4%, and packet latency is reduced by 58.34% as compared to baseline system with wired inter-chip interconnection.