Nesta dissertação, os principais conceitos de MEMS, suas aplicações, processos de fabricação, componentes e sistemas são abordados. O objetivo desta dissertação é o estudo detalhado de chaves MEMS para aplicações em RF, que apresentam bom comportamento em altas freqüências e com potencial de melhoria em sua banda de operação. Em particular, aprofundou-se o estudo para o caso de uma chave MEMS de membrana capacitiva paralela sobre um guia de onda coplanar ou CPW - Coplanar Waveguide. O objetivo foi o de ampliar sua banda de operação, mantendo-se outras especificações inalteradas. Partindo-se de uma chave com banda de operação nula para critérios de perda de retorno e isolação mínimas iguais a 20 dB, com alteração na geometria da chave foi possível obter-se uma banda de 28 GHz e posteriormente ampliá-la para 31 GHz, praticamente sem alteração nas demais características elétricas. / In this thesis, the main concepts of MEMS, their application, fabrication processes, components and systems are addressed. The objective of the thesis is a detailed study of MEMS switches for RF applications, that present good performance at high frequencies and with a potential for bandwidth improvement. More specifically, the study was deeply conducted for shunt capacitive membrane MEMS switches over CPW - Coplanar Waveguide. In this case, the objective was to enlarge the operation bandwidth, keeping the other specifications unchanged. Starting with a switch with null operational bandwidth for criteria of minimum return loss and isolation of 20 dB, after a modification in the switch geometry, it was possible to obtain an operational bandwidth of 28 GHz and then to enlarge it to 31 GHz, keeping almost unchanged the other electric characteristics.

The phase and amplitude gradient estimator (PAGE) method has proven successful in improving the accuracy of measured energy quantities over the p-p method, which has traditionally been used, in several applications. One advantage of the PAGE method is the use of phase unwrapping, which allows for increased measurement bandwidth above the spatial Nyquist frequency. However, phase unwrapping works best for broadband sources in free-field environments with high coherence. Narrowband sources often do not have coherent phase information over a sufficient bandwidth for a phase unwrapping algorithm to unwrap properly. In fact, phase unwrapping processing can cause significant error when there is no coherent signal near and above the spatial Nyquist frequency. However, for signals at any frequencies up to the spatial Nyquist frequency, the PAGE method provides correct intensity measurements regardless of the bandwidth of the signal. This is an improved bandwidth over the traditional method. For narrowband sources above the spatial Nyquist frequency, additional information is necessary for the PAGE method to provide accurate acoustic intensity. With sufficient bandwidth and a coherence of at least 0.1 at the spatial Nyquist frequency, a relatively narrowband source above the spatial Nyquist frequency can be unwrapped accurately. One way of using extra information, called the extrapolated PAGE method, uses the phase of a tone below the spatial Nyquist frequency and an assumption of a propagating field, and therefore linear phase, to extrapolate the phase above the spatial Nyquist frequency. Also, within certain angular and amplitude constraints, low-level broadband noise can be added to the field near a source emitting a narrowband signal above the spatial Nyquist frequency. The low-level additive broadband noise can then provide enough phase information for the phase to be correct at the frequencies of the narrowband signal. All of these methods have been shown to work in a free-field environment.

Most existing telephone networks transmit narrowband coded speech which has been bandlimited to 4 kHz. Compared with normal speech, this speech has a muffled quality and reduced intelligibility, which is particularly noticeable in sounds such as /s/, /f/ and /sh/. Speech which has been bandlimited to 8 kHz is often coded for this reason, but this requires an increase in the bit rate. Wideband enhancement is a scheme that adds a synthesized highband signal to narrowband speech to produce a higher quality wideband speech signal. The synthesized highband signal is based entirely on information contained in the narrowband speech, and is thus achieved at zero increase in the bit rate from a coding perspective. Wideband enhancement can function as a post-processor to any narrowband telephone receiver, or alternatively it can be combined with any narrowband speech coder to produce a very low bit rate wideband speech coder. Applications include higher quality mobile, teleconferencing, and internet telephony. This thesis examines in detail each component of the wideband enhancement scheme: highband excitation synthesis, highband envelope estimation, and narrowband-highband envelope continuity. Objective and subjective test measures are formulated to assess existing and new methods for all components, and the likely limitations to the performance of wideband enhancement are also investigated. A new method for highband excitation synthesis is proposed that uses a combination of sinusoidal transform coding-based excitation and random excitation. Several new techniques for highband spectral envelope estimation are also developed. The performance of these techniques is shown to be approaching the limit likely to be achieved. Subjective tests demonstrate that wideband speech synthesized using these techniques has higher quality than the input narrowband speech. Finally, a new paradigm for very low bit rate wideband speech coding is presented in which the quality of the wideband enhancement scheme is improved further by allocating a very small bitstream for highband envelope and gain coding. Thus, this thesis demonstrates that wideband speech can be communicated at or near the bit rate of a narrowband speech coder.

<p>Direkt viktoptimering (Direct Weight Optimization, DWO) är en ickeparamterisk systemidentifieringsmetod. DWO bygger på att man skattar ett funktionsvärde i en viss punkt genom en viktad summa av mätvärden, där vikterna optimeras fram. Det faktum att DWO har en inparameter som man måste veta i förväg leder till att man på något sätt vill skatta denna inparameter. Det finns många sätt man kan göra denna skattning på men det centrala i denna uppsats är att skatta inparametern lokalt. Fördelen med detta är att metoden anpassar sig om till exempel systemet ändrar beteende från att variera långsamt till att variera snabbare. Denna typ av metoder brukar kallas adaptiva metoder.Det finns flera metoder för att skatta en inparameter lokalt och anpassningen till DWO är redan klar för ett fåtal som lämpar sig bra. Det är dock inte undersökt vilken av dessa metoder som ger det bästa resultatet för just DWO. Syftet med denna uppsats är alltså att ta reda på hur man lokalt kan skatta en inparameter till DWO på bästa sätt och om DWO är en bra grund att basera en adaptiv metod på.Det har visat sig att DWO kanske är för känslig för en lokalt vald inparameter för att vara en bra grund att basera en adaptiv metod på. Däremot utmärker sig en av metoderna för att skatta inparametern genom att vara mycket bättre än de andra metoderna när den kanske inte borde vara det. Varför den är så bra kan vara ett bra ämne för vidare forskning.</p> / <p>Direct Weight Optimization (DWO) is a nonparametric system identification meth\-od. In DWO the value of a function in a certain point is estimated by a weighted sum of measured values. The weights are obtained as a solution to a convex optimization problem. DWO has a design parameter which has to be chosen or estimated a priori. There are many ways to estimate this parameter. The main focus of this thesis is to estimate this parameter locally. The advantage of estimating the parameter locally is that the estimate will adapt if the system changes behavior from slowly varying to rapidly varying. Estimation methods of this type are usually called adaptive estimation methods.There are a number of adaptive estimation methods and the adaptation of some of these methods to DWO has already been done. There are however no evaluation studies done. The goal with this thesis is therefore to find out how to estimate the parameter in DWO in the best way and to find out whether DWO is a good base for an adaptive method.It turned out that DWO might be too sensitive to local changes in the design parameter to be a good base for an adaptive method. However, one of the adaptive estimation methods stands out from the rest because it is much better than the other methods when it, perhaps, should not. Why this method is good might be a good subject for further research.</p>

A design of anautomatic network capacity markets, oftenreferred to as a bandwidth market, is presented. Three topicsare investigated. First, a network model is proposed. Theproposed model is based upon a trisection of the participantroles into network users, network owners, and market middlemen.The network capacity is defined in a way that allows it to betraded, and to have a well defined price. The network devicesare modeled as core nodes, access nodes, and border nodes.Requirements on these are given. It is shown how theirfunctionalities can be implemented in a network. Second, asimulated capacity market is presented, and a statisticalmethod for estimating the price dynamics in the market isproposed. A method for pricing network services based on sharedcapacity is proposed, in which the price of a service isequivalent to that of a financial derivative contract on anumber of simple capacity shares.Third, protocols for theinteraction between the participants are proposed. The marketparticipants need to commit to contracts with an auditableprotocol with a small overhead. The proposed protocol is basedon a public key infrastructure and on known protocols for multiparty contract signing. The proposed model allows networkcapacity to be traded in a manner that utilizes the networkeciently. A new feature of this market model, compared to othernetwork capacity markets, is that the prices are not controlledby the network owners. It is the end-users who, by middlemen,trade capacity among each-other. Therefore, financial, ratherthan control theoretic, methods are used for the pricing ofcapacity. <b>Keywords:</b>Computer network architecture, bandwidthtrading, inter-domain Quality-of-Service, pricing,combinatorial allocation, financial derivative pricing,stochastic modeling

The aim of source coding is to represent information as accurately as possible using as few bits as possible and in order to do so redundancy from the source needs to be removed. The aim of channel coding is in some sense the contrary, namely to introduce redundancy that can be exploited to protect the information when being transmitted over a nonideal channel. Combining these two techniques leads to the area of joint source-channel coding which in general makes it possible to achieve a better performance when designing a communication system than in the case when source and channel codes are designed separately. In this thesis four particular areas in joint source-channel coding are studied: analog (i.e. continuous) bandwidth expansion, distributed source coding over noisy channels, multiple description coding (MDC) and soft decoding. A general analog bandwidth expansion code based on orthogonal polynomials is proposed and analyzed. The code has a performance comparable with other existing schemes. However, the code is more general in the sense that it is implementable for a larger number of source distributions. The problem of distributed source coding over noisy channels is studied. Two schemes are proposed and analyzed for this problem which both work on a sample by sample basis. The first code is based on scalar quantization optimized for a certain channel characteristics. The second code is nonlinear and analog. Two new MDC schemes are proposed and investigated. The first is based on sorting a frame of samples and transmitting, as side-information/redundancy, an index that describes the resulting permutation. In case that some of the transmitted descriptors are lost during transmission this side information (if received) can be used to estimate the lost descriptors based on the received ones. The second scheme uses permutation codes to produce different descriptions of a block of source data. These descriptions can be used jointly to estimate the original source data. Finally, also the MDC method multiple description coding using pairwise correlating transforms as introduced by Wang et al. is studied. A modi fication of the quantization in this method is proposed which yields a performance gain. A well known result in joint source-channel coding is that the performance of a communication system can be improved by using soft decoding of the channel output at the cost of a higher decoding complexity. An alternative to this is to quantize the soft information and store the pre-calculated soft decision values in a lookup table. In this thesis we propose new methods for quantizing soft channel information, to be used in conjunction with soft-decision source decoding. The issue on how to best construct finite-bandwidth representations of soft information is also studied. / QC 20100920

Low income proportion (LIP), Lorenz curve (LC) and generalized Lorenz curve (GLC) are important indexes in describing the inequality of income distribution. They have been widely used for measuring social stability by governments around the world. The accuracy of estimating those indexes is essential to quantify the economics of a country. Established statistical inferential methods for these indexes are based on an asymptotic normal distribution, which may have poor performance when the real income data is skewed or has outliers. Recent applications of nonparametric methods, though, allow researchers to utilize techniques without giving data the parametric distribution assumption. For example, existing research proposes the plug-in empirical likelihood (EL)-based inferences for LIP, LC and GLC. However, this method becomes computationally intensive and mathematically complex because of the presence of nonlinear constraints in the underlying optimization problem. Meanwhile, the limiting distribution of the log empirical likelihood ratio is a scaled Chi-square distribution. The estimation of the scale constant will affect the overall performance of the plug-in EL method. To improve the efficiency of the existing inferential methods, this dissertation first proposes kernel estimators for LIP, LC and GLC, respectively. Then the cross-validation method is proposed to choose bandwidth for the kernel estimators. These kernel estimators are proved to have asymptotic normality. The smoothed jackknife empirical likelihood (SJEL) for LIP, LC and GLC are defined. Then the log-jackknife empirical likelihood ratio statistics are proved to follow the standard Chi-square distribution. Extensive simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the kernel estimators in terms of Mean Square Error and Asymptotic Relative Efficiency. Next, the SJEL-based confidence intervals and the smoothed bootstrap-based confidence intervals are proposed. The coverage probability and interval length for the proposed confidence intervals are calculated and compared with the normal approximation-based intervals. The proposed kernel estimators are found to be competitive estimators, and the proposed inferential methods are observed to have better finite-sample performance. All inferential methods are illustrated through real examples.

Direkt viktoptimering (Direct Weight Optimization, DWO) är en ickeparamterisk systemidentifieringsmetod. DWO bygger på att man skattar ett funktionsvärde i en viss punkt genom en viktad summa av mätvärden, där vikterna optimeras fram. Det faktum att DWO har en inparameter som man måste veta i förväg leder till att man på något sätt vill skatta denna inparameter. Det finns många sätt man kan göra denna skattning på men det centrala i denna uppsats är att skatta inparametern lokalt. Fördelen med detta är att metoden anpassar sig om till exempel systemet ändrar beteende från att variera långsamt till att variera snabbare. Denna typ av metoder brukar kallas adaptiva metoder.Det finns flera metoder för att skatta en inparameter lokalt och anpassningen till DWO är redan klar för ett fåtal som lämpar sig bra. Det är dock inte undersökt vilken av dessa metoder som ger det bästa resultatet för just DWO. Syftet med denna uppsats är alltså att ta reda på hur man lokalt kan skatta en inparameter till DWO på bästa sätt och om DWO är en bra grund att basera en adaptiv metod på.Det har visat sig att DWO kanske är för känslig för en lokalt vald inparameter för att vara en bra grund att basera en adaptiv metod på. Däremot utmärker sig en av metoderna för att skatta inparametern genom att vara mycket bättre än de andra metoderna när den kanske inte borde vara det. Varför den är så bra kan vara ett bra ämne för vidare forskning. / Direct Weight Optimization (DWO) is a nonparametric system identification meth\-od. In DWO the value of a function in a certain point is estimated by a weighted sum of measured values. The weights are obtained as a solution to a convex optimization problem. DWO has a design parameter which has to be chosen or estimated a priori. There are many ways to estimate this parameter. The main focus of this thesis is to estimate this parameter locally. The advantage of estimating the parameter locally is that the estimate will adapt if the system changes behavior from slowly varying to rapidly varying. Estimation methods of this type are usually called adaptive estimation methods.There are a number of adaptive estimation methods and the adaptation of some of these methods to DWO has already been done. There are however no evaluation studies done. The goal with this thesis is therefore to find out how to estimate the parameter in DWO in the best way and to find out whether DWO is a good base for an adaptive method.It turned out that DWO might be too sensitive to local changes in the design parameter to be a good base for an adaptive method. However, one of the adaptive estimation methods stands out from the rest because it is much better than the other methods when it, perhaps, should not. Why this method is good might be a good subject for further research.

MPLS-Based Best-Effort Traffic Engineering Jerapong Rojanarowan 120 Pages Directed by Dr. Henry L. Owen The objective of this research is to develop a multipath traffic engineering framework for best-effort traffic in Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks so as to deliver more equal shares of bandwidth to best-effort users as compared to the traditional shortest-path algorithm. The proposed framework is static and the input to the traffic engineering algorithm is restricted to network topology. Performance evaluation of this framework is conducted by simulation using ns-2 network simulator. In a multi-service capable network, some portion of the bandwidth is reserved for guaranteed services and the leftover portion is dedicated to best-effort service. This research examines the problem of traffic engineering for the remaining network bandwidth that is utilized by best-effort traffic where demands are not known a priori. This framework will result in making the limited available best-effort traffic bandwidth more equitably shared by the best-effort flows over a wide range of demands. Traditional traffic engineering research has not examined best-effort traffic.

In an IEEE802.15.4 beacon-enabled wireless personal area network (WPAN), the PAN coordinator can allocate slots using contention free-GTSs (guaranteed the time slots) for admitted devices. However, due to fixed slot size, the bandwidth waste problem may arise. Hence, reference [6] proposed the multi-beacon superframe structure (MBS) to overcome this problem. However, in [6], the structure of sub-beacon intervals in a superframe is non-adaptive. Therefore, this thesis proposes an enhanced multi-beacon superframe structure (EMBS). In EMBS, a PAN coordinator employs the greedy SBI-allocation algorithm to adjust a superframe structure according to the traffic demand of admitted devices such that a superframe can consist of a number of different types of sub-beacon intervals (SBIs). Simulation results reveal that a WPAN using EMBS can attain higher bandwidth utilization than a WPAN using 802.15.4 or MBS.