Abstract
Non-rectangular cores of standard-cell-based reconfigurable logic can be used to fill space left on System-on-Chips, thereby providing the system with hardware reconfigurability. The proposed architecture for a non-rectangular reconfigurable core is based on a fixed set of blocks that implement logic functions, interconnections and configurable switching. The basic blocks connect by abutment to form clusters and clusters abut to form a complete reconfigurable core. A software tool was created to generate a gate-level netlist and the floorplan data of the reconfigurable logic core together with a basic testbench. Cores with non-rectangular shapes were created using 90 nm and 45 nm standard-cell technologies and validated by simulation. The results demonstrate the feasibility of a flexible, technology-independent architecture for non-rectangular reconfigurable logic cores that can be physically implemented using a standard digital design flow.

Abstract
Human recognition of isolated vowels is quite robust considering intra and inter-speaker variability. Automatic recognition techniques typically exhibit poor performances, notably in the case of female or child speech because a higher fundamental frequency (F0) generates a sparser sampling of the magnitude spectrum. In this paper we extend previous results on a perceptually motivated concept of vowel recognition that is based on Perceptual Spectral Clusters (PSC) of harmonic partials. We study the effect of normalizing relevant PSC features by F0 taking as a reference the recognition performance of static features derived from either Linear Prediction (LP) analysis or Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), and using the Mahalanobis distance on a data base of five natural Portuguese vowel sounds uttered by 44 speakers. Test results reveal that the recognition performance of F0-normalized PSC features increases approaching that of MFCC coefficients. These results are significant as PSC related features are amenable to concurrent vowel identification while LP or MFCC-related features are not.

Abstract
The users of telecommunications services are demanding access to their subscribed services in mobile contexts. This demand leads to the development of mechanisms that enable the transference of service sessions between networks, seamlessly to the user. These mechanisms allow the operator to jointly manage its networks resources, providing a better service to its customers and, simultaneously, increasing its revenue. Starting from the UMTS and WLAN interconnection architecture defined by 3GPP, this paper presents a new strategy for joint radio resource management, suitable for contexts where these networks are interconnected. This strategy bases its decisions on criteria related to user mobility characteristics. The algorithm also introduces the possibility of renegotiating new calls and reallocating running calls from one access network to another. The new radio resource management strategy is compared with two well-known strategies, the former based on coverage area and the later based on load balancing. The comparison studies show the proposed strategy outperforms the other strategies in what concerns call blocking probability and applications QoS support. Besides, the proposed strategy tends to reduce the handoffs between networks.

Abstract
Factors such as the growing number of multimedia terminals, the constant increase of bandwidth available per user, and the large number of existing data sharing applications, are compelling users to generate and distribute their own content to restricted groups of other users. Inorder to support such scenario, we present an IMS-based solution that enables content distribution, in multicast, to groups of users, where the source of the content is also an end-user The proposed solution allows the source of content to configure the service, indicating a list of authorized receivers and both the transmission date and duration. Moreover, the proposed solution also allows the operator to manage the registered user profiles, to impose access control and to validate the configurations submitted by the users.

Abstract

Abstract
The changes in the communication paradigm envisioned for future networks, with peer-to-peer/symmetric attachments gaining momentum and two IP (Internet Protocol) versions coexisting, will pose new challenges to mobile communication networks. Traditional IP auto-configuration mechanisms will not work properly, since they were designed mostly having in mind a client-server/asymmetric attachment model, they assume a single IP version paradigm, and they target the auto-configuration of devices only. The IST Ambient Networks project has introduced a new concept - the Ambient Network - that enables handling every communication entity, either a single device or an entire network, as an Ambient Network (AN). This paper describes a new efficient mechanism, named Basic Connectivity (BC) mechanism, for auto-configuring IP connectivity between attaching ANs. A proof-of-concept prototype, experimental results, and theoretical analysis show that BC suites the future networking paradigm and represents a solution more efficient than the current trial-and-error mechanism for auto-configuring IP connectivity.