In this dissertation, new approaches in the design of a voice transformation (VT) system for Turkish are proposed. Objectives in this thesis are two-fold. The first objective is to develop standard speech corpora and segmentation tools for Turkish speech research. The second objective is to consider new approaches for VT. A triphone-balanced set of 2462 Turkish sentences is prepared for analysis. An audio corpus of 100 speakers, each uttering 40 sentences out of the 2462-sentence set, is used to train a speech recognition system designed for English. This system is ported to Turkish to obtain a phonetic aligner and a phoneme recognizer. The triphone-balanced sentence set and the phonetic aligner are used to develop a speech corpus for VT. A new voice transformation approach based on Mixed Excitation Linear Prediction (MELP) speech coding framework is proposed. Multi-stage vector quantization of MELP is used to obtain speaker-specific line-spectral frequency (LSF) codebooks for source and target speakers. Histograms mapping the LSF spaces of source and target speakers are used for transformation in the baseline system. The baseline system is improved by a dynamic programming approach to estimate the target LSFs. As a second approach to the VT problem, quantizing the LSFs using k-means clustering algorithm is applied with dimension reduction of LSFs using principle component analysis. This approach provides speaker-specific codebooks out of the speech corpus instead of using MELP&#039 / s pre-trained LSF codebook. Evaluations show that both dimension reduction and dynamic programming improve the transformation performance.

The introduction of broadband systems to communication and radar technologies has demanded the design of broadband antennas. In this thesis, broadband log-periodic dipole antennas and reflector antennas are investigated. A dual polarized log-periodic dipole antenna and a reflector antenna are designed and analyzed within the frequency band of 0.4-18 GHz. Basic theory and calculations about mutual coupling between the linear antenna elements are given. The currents at the bases of dipoles of the log-periodic antenna are found and these currents are used as inputs for the design of the reflector antenna. After the simulations made with MATLAB&Ograve / and FORTRAN, a prototype single polarized log-periodic antenna is produced. Developments on the prototype antenna are performed, both to improve the electrical characteristics of the antenna and to make the final design realizable. After the performance of the single polarized log-periodic antenna is found satisfactory, dual polarized antenna is produced. Performances of both single and dual polarized log-periodic antennas are measured in the anechoic chamber at ASELSAN&reg / Inc. After the measurements of the antenna, using the currents at the bases of the dipoles, a reflector antenna is designed using &ldquo / MIR&rdquo / program written in FORTRAN, which is based on physical optics method. A method to calculate the aperture blockage of the reflector is developed. Simulation results of reflector antenna are given.

In this thesis, performances of some Mobile IP handoff schemes have been compared. The comparison has been based on simulation results. Simulation study has been carried out with a MIP model developed using OMNeT++ and available model frameworks. The literature on Mobile IP and several improvements including handoff management schemes have been surveyed. A MIP model has been constructed and then validated with the help of some scenarios in the literature, especially the one found in [7]. The model has been then used to investigate performances of FMIP. The study also included performance of FMIP under local traffic where mobile hosts communicate with each other in the same domain. Simulations are carried out under several scenarios involving UDP and TCP transfers. Mobile host speed and base station buffer size variables have been changed throughout the simulations. The result show that use of L2 triggers reduces handoff latency as both FMIP Post-Reg and Pre-Reg have better performance than HMIP without L2 triggers. The results also show that FMIP Post-Reg is a good candidate for future MIP infrastructures with its low latency handoff characteristics due to bidirectional tunneling between old and new points of attachment. Moreover, the results suggest that FMIP Post-Reg is also the best handoff scheme under local traffic where mobile hosts communicate among each other in the same foreign network.

Congestion control is concerned with allocating the resources in a network such that the network can operate at an acceptable performance level when the demand exceeds or is near the capacity of the network resources. These resources include bandwidths of links, buffer space (memory) and processing capacity at intermediate nodes. Although resource allocation is necessary even at low load, the problem becomes more important as the load increases. Without proper congestion control mechanisms, the throughput may be reduced considerably under heavy load. Future applications are expected to require increasingly higher bandwidth and generate a heterogeneous mix of network traffic. ATM network is potentially capable of supporting all classes of traffic (e.g., voice, video, and data) and have multiple service classes allow audio, video and data to share the same network. Of these, the Available Bit Rate (ABR) service class is designed to efficiently support data traffic. Switch algorithms have been the most investigated topic of ABR. This has happened because the specification of ABR given by the ATM Forum allows a diversity of switch algorithms to be implemented. These range from the simplest binary switches to the more complex ER switches. The major part of this thesis has been devoted to ABR. First an introduction to the concept of congestion control and a brief literature survey of congestion control for ABR service of ATM networks are presented. Then two proposed congestion control mechanisms for the ABR service class in ATM networks are examined by means of simulation, showing the different degree of performance and complexity. The simulation results presented in this thesis were obtained using a network simulator written in C++. This network simulator is a small event driven program. Analytical results were derived for different network configurations and different scenarios using this program.

The plasma antennas offer a new solution to new requirements that are imposed on antenna systems with the advancing communication technology and increasing demand on wider frequency bands. In this thesis the plasma antennas are investigated for the radar and communication applications. The interaction of gas and semiconductor plasma with electromagnetic waves is inspected theoretically, and several experiments on the interaction of microwaves with gas plasma are conducted. Results of these experiments show that a relatively simple setup can produce plasma dense enough to interact with microwaves of frequency about 8 GHz. The previous studies of other institutes on plasma antennas are surveyed, emphasizing the results important for the use in radar and communication applications. Finally, semiconductor plasma is introduced, and an antenna system utilizing the semiconductor plasma generated by optical excitation is proposed.

Multicasting is a technique used for distributing data packets from one or more sources to a set of receivers on interconnected networks. Currently developing network applications bring specific quality of service (QoS) requirements like bounded delay, minimum bandwidth, and maximum data loss rate. Providing the required quality of service addresses routing and resource reservation concepts. In this study, a literature survey is carried out on traditional and QoS multicast routing protocols, and the need for QoS routing protocols is investigated. QoS multicast routing protocols are classified and compared according to their multicast tree construction and resource reservation approaches. Two QoS protocols, QROUTE and QMBF, are selected, and their performances are experimentally compared using the network simulation tool Network Simulator-2 (ns-2). The objective of the simulations is to compare the QoS routing algorithms and their tree construction efficiencies. The first contribution of the thesis is the survey and classification of traditional and QoS multicast routing protocols. Another contribution is the ns-2 implementation of two QoS multicast routing protocols. The final contribution of the thesis is the performance evaluation of the recent protocols from a different perspective.

In this thesis, we work on the upper bound for nonlinearity of t-resilient Boolean functions given by Sarkar and Maitra, which is based on divisibility properties of spectral weights of resilient functions and study construction methods that achieve the upper bound. One of the construction methods, introduced by Maity and Johansson, starts with a bent function and complements some values of its truth table corresponding to a previously chosen set of inputs, S, which satisfies three criteria. In this thesis, we show that a fourth criterion is needed for t-resiliency of the resulting function, and prove that three criteria of Maity and Johansson do not guarantee resiliency. We also work on other constructions, one by Sarkar and Maitra, which uses a Maiorana-McFarland like technique to satisfy the upper bound and the other by Tarannikov, which satisfies the nonlinearity bound using a technique with low computational complexity. However, these methods have tendency to maximize the order of resiliency for a given number of variables, therefore one cannot construct functions for all possible resiliency values given the number of variables, using this method. We further go into details and compute the auto-correlation functions of the constructed Boolean functions to find the absolute indicator and sum-of-squared-errors for each of them. We also provide a comparison of Boolean functions constructed by other techniques given in the literature, together with the ones studied in this thesis.

Continuous Wave (CW) radars are preferred for their low probability of intercept by the other receivers. Frequency modulation techniques, the linear frequency modulation (LFM) technique in particular, are commonly used in CW radars to resolve the range and the radial velocity of the detected targets. The conventional method for target detection in a linear FMCW radar makes use of a mixer followed by a low-pass filter whose output is Fourier transformed to get the range and velocity information. In this thesis, an alternative target detection technique based on the use of the Ambiguity Function (AF) will be investigated in frequency modulated CW radars. Results of the AF-based technique and the conventional Fourier-based technique will be compared for different target detection scenarios.

ABSTRACT WAVEFORM DESIGN FOR PULSE DOPPLER RADAR AgIRMAN, Handan M.S., Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mete Severcan December 2005, 100 pages This study is committed to the investigation of optimum waveforms for a pulse doppler radar which uses a non linear high power amplifier in the transmitter. The optimum waveform is defined as the waveform with the lowest peak and integrated side lobe level, the narrowest main lobe in its autocorrelation and the narrowest bandwidth in its spectrum. The Pulse Compression method is used in radar systems since it is more advantageous in terms of the resolution. Among all pulse compression methods, the main focus of this study is on Phase Coding. Two types of radar waveforms assessed throughout this study are Discrete Phase Modulated Waveforms and Continuous Phase Modulated Waveforms. The continuous phase modulated waveforms are arranged under two titles: the memoryless phase modulated waveform and the waveform modulated with memory. In order to form memoryless continuous phase waveforms, initially, discrete phase codes are obtained by using Genetic Algorithm. Following this process, a new phase shaping pulse is defined and applied on the discrete phase waveforms. Among the applicable modulation with memory techniques, Continuous Phase Modulation maintains to be the most appropriate. The genetic algorithm is used to find different lengths of optimum data sequences which form the continuous phase scheme.

ABSTRACT ROBUST DATA HIDING SCHEME WITH TURBO CODES &Uuml / NAL, BariS M.S., Department of Electrical And Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. R&uuml / yal ERG&Uuml / L December 2005, 127 pages This study describes the design and implementation of a robust data hiding algorithm which is provided by turbo codes. As the digital technology grows up, it is getting easy to copy and distribute multimedia products without getting legal permission. This has forced researchers to study in digital watermarking areas. Along with watermarking researches, data hiding studies have gained interest in the last decade. Different watermark and data hiding algorithms have been proposed considering different requirements and properties such as robustness, fidelity, invisibility and data hiding capacity. In this thesis, robustness of watermarking systems and fidelity requirement in watermark models are considered and use of turbo codes is proposed with data embedding systems to improve system performance in terms of robustness. Fundamental watermarking algorithms in DCT domain are analyzed and simulated. Their performances in terms of robustness are presented. Data hiding algorithm which is based on projection and perturbation in transform domain is implemented in visual C. Then turbo codes are applied to this algorithm to improve system robustness. Improvement provided by turbo codes is demonstrated and compared with other discussed watermarking systems.