The main objective of this dissertation is to present the structural design, performance evaluation, and complexity reduction of iterative joint channel estimation and data detection receivers. One of the main technical challenges in advanced wireless communications stems from the characteristics of a wireless channel, e.g., time selectivity of a channel, mobility of users, and multipath propagation. Channel estimation is essential for achieving reliable information transmission for practical wireless communication applications. Numerous channel estimation structures have been developed for different underlying channels using pilot-symbol assisted modulation (PSAM) approaches. However, since pilot symbols carry no data information, the time and the power spent on pilot symbols degrades the efficiency and the throughput of the system. Therefore, it is necessary to minimize the pilot insertion ratio without degrading the error performance. This motivates our research on iterative joint channel estimation and data detection receivers with full- and reduced- or low-complexity. In this thesis, we first propose an iterative channel estimator (ICE), based on a maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm, for single-carrier systems with PSAM structures. In contrast to existing MAP channel estimators, the proposed channel estimator has a lower computational complexity, which increases linearly with the modulation alphabet size. The computational complexity is reduced by exploiting a survivor in an efficient manner, while achieving comparable error performance to a full complexity receiver. For orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, we also propose novel signal constellations to facilitate channel estimation without pilot symbol transmission, and analyze the bit error rate for the proposed constellations. We also develop a suitable joint channel estimation and data detector with full- and low-complexity for the proposed constellations. This low-complexity ICE achieves an error performance comparable to the ICE with full-complexity. Finally, for vertical Bell Laboratories layered space-time OFDM systems, we propose an ICE based on a PSAM structure for time-varying multipath fading channels. By exploiting the statistical properties of a wireless channel, we also develop a method to suppress intercarrier interference due to the channel time selectivity, and propose a low-complexity ICE that exploits a priori information in an efficient manner.

This body of work forms a detailed and comprehensive guide for those interested in performing broadband wireless channel measurements. Discussion addresses the theoretical and practical aspects of designing and implementing a sliding correlator channel sounder, as well as how such a system may be used to measure and model the ultra-wideband wireless channel. The specific contributions of this work are as follows: Developed a systematic methodology for designing optimal sliding correlator-based channel sounders. Constructed a UWB channel sounder based upon a 17-bit LFSR that attained 1.66 ns of temporal resolution and 34 dB of dynamic range. Performed an exemplary measurement campaign of the UWB channel from which UWB angular spreads and RMS delay spreads are reported. The design procedure developed in Chapter 3 will allow researchers to build optimal channel sounders for investigating next-generation wireless channels. Chapter 4 s discussion addresses the real-world challenges of constructing a high performance sliding correlator channel sounder. Finally, the measurement campaign discussed in Chapter 5 outlines a procedure for investigating the spatio-temporal characteristics of the wireless channel and provides some of the first examples of UWB angular spread measurements.

With the prosperity of economy, the increase of national income, and the improvement of living standards, female consumers¡¦ requirement of underwear are changing gradually from the function of simple cover and warmth to the pursuit of fashion and self-expression. As a result, we can see the underwear market has a substantially growth in the recent years. When observing the market activities, we found that the branches opened one after another. The underwear industry continues to develop. In this study, we took ¡§EASY SHOP¡¨, the sub brand of Audrey Taiwan, as an example to discuss the effects between channel characteristic and brand equity, and then to see if the latter would affect consumer¡¦s behavior. Furthermore, we regard channel characteristic as independent variable, brand awareness, brand loyalty, perceived quality, brand association and brand image as intervening variables, and finally consumer characteristic as moderating variable to discover the impact on consumer behavior. The purposes of this study are as following¡G1. To discuss the degree of effect on brand equity which caused by channel characteristic. 2. To study the degree of effect on brand equity which caused by consuming behavior. 3. To exam the degree of moderate on consuming behavior caused by consumer characteristics. Our target interviewers are female consumers that have visited ¡§EASY SHOP¡¨ and bought underwear by themselves. Through the questionnaire analysis, we are intent on understanding the views of consumers. And also, we use SPSS to conduct the analysis process to see if channel characteristic and brand equity have an impact on consumer behaviors. We found that¡G1. The service quality of Physical channel are more reliable by consumers. 2. Channel characteristic has an impact on brand image and brand association. 3. Brand equity has an impact on consuming behavior. 4. Brand loyalty has a deeper impact on consumer behavior. 5. Consumer characteristic has moderating effect on underwear consuming behavior.

Numerical study of laminar convective cooling of ribs in a parallel plate channel is investigated. Single rib mounted on one channel wall in forced, mixed and free convection is analyzed. Furthermore, the series ribs array with in-line and staggered mounted on channel walls are considered. Through the use of a stream function vorticity transformation, solution of the transformed governing equations for the system is obtained using the control volume method with non-uniform grid. The effects of the Reynolds number, thermal conductivity ratio of rib to fluid and rib¡¦s profile area on heat transfer rate of single rib and rib array are presented. In addition, the effects of the length from inlet to the first rib and the space between ribs for rib array are carried out. A correlation for single and rib array in forced convection is presented to estimate the optimum aspect ratio of rib with various Reynolds number, thermal conductivity ratio of rib to fluid, rib¡¦s profile area. Furthermore, the results of different Gr/Re2 and various channel inclination angle in mixed convection are also examined numerically. The results indicate that both in forced and mixed convection, the optimum aspect ratio of a rib corresponding to the rib with maximum heat transfer rate increases with increasing Re but decreases with K for a fixed rib profile area. In forced convection the optimum aspect ratio of rib array increases with rib¡¦s space but decreases with the length from inlet to the first rib of channel. Then, numerical correlations to predict the optimum aspect ratio of single rib and rib array are developed for fixed rib¡¦s area with various Re, K and rib number. In mixed convection, the optimum aspect ratios of single rib and staggered rib array increase with not only the inclination angle but also Gr/Re2.

In Taiwan, the rubber industry began to bloom from the Japanese Colonial Era, and most of the rubber technologies were originated from Japan. Its evolution began from the rubber parts to the synthetic rubber manufacturing. The most of synthetic rubber manufacturers are cooperated with companies from Japan and US, the rubber industry was allowed to develop vigorously in a short period of time. In contrary to Taiwan, China could only obtain the obsolete rubber technologies and management skills from the Former USSR due to economy sanction during the Cold War period. The rubber industries lagged behind in terms of quality, production efficiency, and management. As China embraced the Socialist Planned Economy after the Communist Victory in Civil War, the marketing and sales made subject to state control and development was being dragged. After the Reform and Opening-Up, although there were a bunch of rubber manufacturers from Japan and western countries started to establish local production activities in China, the foreign investment bogged down after the Tiananman Square Protest in 1989. Only the Taiwanese manufacturers moved their steps to China against the tide with modern production technologies and management skills. The complementary development brought by Taiwan and China contributed significant improvement in quality of Chinese rubber goods and became a story on everybody¡¦s lips on the cooperation of the rubber industries between two sides of Taiwan Strait. Rubber industries are closely related to national defense and consumer goods, which makes themselves equally import to plastic industries. However, due to the labor-intensive nature of rubber industries and the serious lack of labor force in Taiwan in 1990¡¦s, the Taiwanese rubber industries began to move their production sites to China and accelerated the inosculation of the rubber industries in Taiwan and China. As the main raw material of rubber industries, the synthetic rubber is no exceptional either. In the end of 20th Century, China has successfully become the ¡§World Factory¡¨ and the consumption and capacity of synthetic rubber became the top of the world. Then the financial crisis in 2008 turned the China¡¦s policies to concentrate the development of the domestic demand, which made China the ¡§World Market¡¨. In recent years, the relationships between Taiwan and China have been substantially improved. The Economy Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) is officially signed and taking effects, the economical activities and relationships between both sides are expected to be more liberalized than the past. The study is specially focused on the evolution of the marketing channel of the synthetic rubber between Taiwan and China, and how ECFA is going to possibly affect the synthetic rubber industries. The study will integrate the writer¡¦s points of view and the various ideas abstracted from the interviews with the several Associations and main agents/distributors in Taiwan and China in order to infer the trends of future development of rubber industries. With this study, the readers who are in the business are allowed to be more clear about the evolution of the marketing channel of the synthetic rubber industries and the trends of future development, so that the readers can take the initiatives to prepare for the future.

Recently, the difficulty of placing multiple antennas onto a mobile terminal to exploit more diversity has been solved by using the cooperative communication technique, in which several relay nodes with a single antenna partner with each other to serve as virtual multiple antennas for providing the spatial diversity. Many existing researches in cooperative communication focuses on designing relay strategies to achieve better communication performance. However, most of their designs require the channel state information (CSI) being perfectly known. Unfortunately, CSI is generally unknown in practice. Therefore, before getting benefits brought by the relay-assisted network, it is necessary to obtain accurate channel state information (CSI) at the destination or relays. In this thesis, we also consider the training design for channel estimation in the AF relay network. The involvement of multiple relay nodes to exploit space diversity in cooperative communications requires sophisticated and complicated protocols, which poses a difficulty in avoiding all possible misbehaving relay nodes. Therefore, the channel estimation scheme in cooperative communication network needs to be robust against the possible relay misbehaviors. However, most prior works focused on developing channel estimation schemes by assuming perfect relayassisted communication protocol. By contrast, this work focuses on designing robust channel estimation schemes to combat the possible presence of the relay misbehaviors. Besides considering the robust design against relay misbehaviors, this work also considers more general channel model when designing the training sequence and channel estimation scheme. Specifically, in contrast to assume independent channels across relays, this thesis considers the correlated channels in both phases and the correlated noises in the first phase. Overall, the main problem of this work is to design robust channel estimation and training sequences against relay misbehaviors when the communication channels within the cooperative network are not restricted to be independent.

With the wireless mesh network in the embedded systems related applications booming in recent years, the demand of enhancing the overall end to end network traffic and ensuring a stable connection is growing. We proposed a Dynamic Multi-channel Multi-path Routing Protocol (DMMR Protocol) to decompose contending traffics over different channel, different time and different paths to enhance the end to end network traffic. Choosing channel dynamically according to the channel usage around node in the process of finding paths can avoid inter-flow and intra-flow channel competition. We tend to choose paths with less intersection nodes to reduce the probability of multiple paths are broken at same time when a single node cannot work. We can enhance end to end network traffic further by using multiple interfaces at one node. We use NS2 to test DMMR Protocol, and analyzing the overall end to end traffic when multiple connections are setting up in the network. If the network can accept a new connection, the increment of end to end traffic is same as the traffic of the new connection. In connection robust test, a single path broken will not affect other flows in same connection and the end to end traffic in the connection will recovery immediately when the broken path is repaired.

In order to expand global market share and enhance the benefits of economics of scale, Trans-National Media Corporations (TNMCs) exploits overseas markets actively. The Chinese region which contains more than one billion audience is regarded as an important target market by TNMCs. Taiwan TV industry which allows foreign investments is always the leading region of Chinese film industry and popular culture. On condition that analyzing the glocalization strategy of foreign satellite channels in Taiwan, we can construct the best operation strategy among Chinese regions. Therefore, we use case study method to investigate not only the business strategies of Star Ltd. Group¡¦s Channel[V] and Viacom¡¦s MTV Taiwan channel but also the synergy that parent company integrates from local resource. The research method for collecting data combines qualitative and quantitative method. Use literature analysis and in-depth interview for qualitative approach that acquire industrial data. And use questionnaire for quantitative that analyze the market response of audience to see whether they accept the positioning and strategy of Channel[V] and MTV or not. Finally, develop research conclusion and suggestion base on case study method. Regarding research framework, we apply I-R framework and Institutional Theory as our theoretical basis. And divide three strategic perspectives to compare the operation of Channel[V] and MTV. We find that they operate in different ways among glocalization strategy and programming production strategy. The differentiation of Channel positioning leads to competitive strength. Besides, monitoring advertisement sales, product placement, road shows, integration of channel resource, and cross-media marketing campaigns can promote firm¡¦s operational performance. We hope our research conclusion and will help the following researchers and industrial managers.

In this thesis, we study the effect of channel estimation on the performance of distributed space-time coding (DSTC) in amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative networks. The relay based transmission takes two phase. In phase I, the source transmits a block of symbols, which include training symbols and data to destination. After receiving signals at relay, the DSTC is adopted to re-encode signals in order to achieve diversity gain at relay nodes. At destination, the signals received in two phase are combined and used to detected data symbols. In the thesis, for AF cooperative networks, the signal received at destination is effected the multiplication of channel coefficients on the source to relay and relay to destination links. Before detection, channel coefficients of all links need to be estimated. We propose a semiblind method to estimate the channel coefficients of direct link and the relay links. The semi-blind channel estimation scheme, exploits a small number of training symbols and second-order statistics of received signals. To improve the detection quality, the channel estimation is modified by treating the detected symbols as extra training symbols. Through simulation, it shows that the proposed channel estimation and the modification leads to obvious performance improvement.

The cooling problem has become a serious subject in order to keep away from malfunctioning for a high performance and miniaturized electronic component. For instance, the monitor backlight LED must be cooled adequately. In this thesis, a natural convection cooling problem for the vertical channel with equally spaced heating blocks on one wall is studied by a numerical modeling to simulate a monitor backlight LED cooling. A control volume method is employed for the numerical modeling. The results of heat transfer coefficients and hot spots for various channel gap, LED spacing and Rayleigh number are presented. This study can provide design reference for related cooling problems.