The current thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panel industry evolves in transition from volume production to customized production service as a major competition strategy. Owing to the highly mixed production type of small batch sizes and high varieties, metrology data are usually collected too infrequently for building accurate virtual metrology (VM) models. In this paper, a new product-to-product (P2P) VM model to predict photoresist spacer heights in the color filter process of the array sector is developed. First, a position-based random forests model is proposed for the base product. Second, an ensemble model combining the base model and a biased estimation random forests model for the new product of small batch size is proposed to perform P2P VM between different products on the same tool. The real datasets of photoresist spacer heights for different products are used to illustrate the accuracy of the new P2P VM framework in the experimental study. Note to Practitioners—As global competition intensifies, production management needs to be adjusted to adapt swiftly to changes in the time-varying and competitive market. For manufacturing firms, how to operate the manufacturing system effectively and efficiently plays a crucial role in quality and yield improvements. The color filter process in the array sector is of critical importance in the TFT-LCD practice since it essentially dictates the quality level of subsequent processing steps in the cell and assembly sectors. Virtual metrology is a state-of-the-art measure that can be used for monitoring and controlling purposes to maintain the yield and productivity of the color filter process in the highly mixed production environment. An immediate challenge to be faced by the data scientists is how to build accurate virtual metrology models for a variety of product lines separately in color filter manufacturing. A new proposal of product-to-product virtual metrology is first addressed between products, enabling to build appropriate virtual metrology models for new products with small-sized production batches.

Power line communications networks (PLCNs) facilitate efficient power management, data access, and monitoring services over a home area network by using a network implementation taking advantage of the built-in power cable infrastructure. A control station with which attached user stations communicate over the power line is used to coordinate the communications process. As serious distortion and losses are incurred by signals that are transmitted across the power line, it is highly desirable to employ relay stations to support the transmission of such data flows. Yet, to date, only limited research results are available for the cross-layer synthesis and management of such a relay-aided power line communications system. In this paper, we develop and study a relay backbone synthesis algorithm (RBSA) that is used to configure the PLC network topology, allowing active source stations to efficiently transport their message flows to the control station. We also present a relay backbone synthesis algorithm under fixed-topology (RBSAF) that enables the system management mechanism to jointly activate selective relay stations and schedule their sharing of the PLC medium, when considering nonadjustable PLC network topologies. Our new computationally efficient RBSA and RBSAF schemes are proven numerically to achieve throughput rates close to the optimal solution.

Emerging autonomous vehicular technology advances facilitate the development of intelligent traffic regulation systems, aiming to configure vehicular mobility patterns to enhance in-road safety and accommodate high rate transport of vehicle-to- vehicle messaging flows. To date, mechanisms that are implemented to regulate vehicular mobility and those employed to provide for the communications of message flows across the highway, have been studied independently. In this paper, we investigate mechanisms that are used to regulate the mobility of highway vehicles, as they form distinct platoons, while also aiming to disseminate high priority safety and lower priority status messaging flows. We identify desired configurations of platoon entities, and the underlying setting of the parameters of the spatial TDMA scheduling scheme, aiming to satisfy the message delay limits required for the distribution of safety messages while providing for high throughput rates for the transport of status message flows. Under each vehicular traffic congestion regime, we demonstrate the design options that are available in determining the system's performance behavior, trading data messaging vs. vehicular traffic throughput rates.

To successfully deploy femtocells overlaying the Macrocell as a two-tier that had been shown greatly benefiting communications quality in various manners, it requires to mitigate cross-tier interference between the Macrocell and femtocells, and intra-tier interference among femtocells, as well as to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. Existing solutions therefore assign orthogonal radio resources in frequency and spatial domains to each network, however, infeasible for dense femtocells deployments. It is also difficult to apply centralized resource managements facing challenges of scalability to the two-tier. Considering the infeasibility of imposing any modification on existing infrastructures, we leverage the cognitive radio technology to propose the cognitive radio resource management scheme for femtocells to mitigate cross-tier interference. Under such cognitive framework, a strategic game is further developed for the intra-tier interference mitigation. Through the concept of effective capacity, proposed radio resource management schemes are appropriately controlled to achieve required statistical delay guarantees while yielding an efficient radio resources utilization in femtocells. Performance evaluation results show that a considerable performance improvement can be generally achieved by our solution, as compared with that of state-of-the-art techniques, to facilitate the deployment of femtocells.

Consumer communication networking allows connections among consumer devices for possible Ad Hoc or heterogeneous networking on licensed and unlicensed bands. To support maximum flexibility of consumer communication networks, cognitive radio (CR) technology by spectrum sharing can well serve the purpose. Realistic spectrum sharing for cognitive radio networks (CRN) shall be distributed and based on partially available information of spectrum sensing, due to a possible good number of cognitive radios and impossible to perfectly exchange channel availability information. However, existing study assumes either centralized or perfect spectrum sensing. In this paper, we pioneer explore spectrum sensing as a side information and take imperfection of spectrum sensing results into consideration. We therefore develop spectrum sharing algorithms for spectrum access strategy of CRs under two general scenarios: public spectrum information broadcast from the base station and private spectrum information via individual spectrum sensing. Under the public spectrum in-formation, CRs are aware of the strategy of its opponents and therefore game theory model reaches Nash equilibrium as a solution. On the other hand, CRs have to follow maximin criterion with only local spectrum information. Difference in the behaviors of CRs between the two scenarios is identified and the optimal spectrum access strategy is proposed accordingly for both cases. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms work effectively and prevent the system from collision even in a large network.