Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik
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The fifth-generation (5G) of wireless networks promises to bring new advances, such as a huge increase in mobile data rates, a plunge in communications latency, and an increase in the quality of experience perceived by users that can cope with the ever-increasing demand in Internet traffic. However, the high cost of capital and operational expenditure (CAPEX/OPEX) of the new 5G network and the lack of a killer application hinder its rapid adoption. In this context, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) have turned their attention to the following idea: opening up their infrastructure so that vertical businesses can leverage the new 5G network to improve their primary businesses and develop new ones. However, deploying multiple isolated vertical applications on top of the same infrastructure poses unique challenges that must be addressed. In this thesis, we provide critical contributions to developing 5G networks to accommodate different vertical applications in an isolated, flexible, and automated manner. This thesis contributions spawn on three main areas: (i) the development of an integrated fronthaul and backhaul network, (ii) the development of a network slicing overbooking algorithm, and (iii) the development of a method to mitigate the noisy neighbors' problem in a vRAN deployment.
Beamforming performs spatial filtering to preserve the signal from given directions of interest while suppressing interfering signals and noise arriving from other directions.
For example, a microphone array equipped with beamforming algorithm could preserve the sound coming from a target speaker and suppress sounds coming from other speakers.
Beamformer has been widely used in many applications such as radar, sonar, communication, and acoustic systems.
A data-independent beamformer is the beamformer whose coefficients are independent on sensor signals, it normally uses less computation since the coefficients are computed once. Moreover, its coefficients are derived from the well-defined statistical models, then it produces less artifacts. The major drawback of this beamforming class is its limitation to the interference suppression.
On the other hand, an adaptive beamformer is a beamformer whose coefficients depend on or adapt to sensor signals. It is capable of suppressing the interference better than a data-independent beamforming but it suffers from either too much distortion of the signal of interest or less noise reduction when the updating rate of coefficients does not synchronize with the changing rate of the noise model. Besides, it is computationally intensive since the coefficients need to be updated frequently.
In acoustic applications, the bandwidth of signals of interest extends over several octaves, but we always expect that the characteristic of the beamformer is invariant with regard to the bandwidth of interest. This can be achieved by the so-called broadband beamforming.
Since the beam pattern of conventional beamformers depends on the frequency of the signal, it is common to use a dense and uniform array for the broadband beamforming to guarantee some essential performances together, such as frequency-independence, less sensitive to white noise, high directivity factor or high front-to-back ratio. In this dissertation, we mainly focus on the sparse array of which the aim is to use fewer sensors in the array,
while simultaneously assuring several important performances of the beamformer.
In the past few decades, many design methodologies for sparse arrays have been proposed and were applied in a variety of practical applications.
Although good results were presented, there are still some restrictions, such as the number of sensors is large, the designed beam pattern must be fixed, the steering ability is limited and the computational complexity is high.
In this work, two novel approaches for the sparse array design taking a hypothesized uniform array as a basis are proposed, that is, one for data-independent beamformers and the another for adaptive beamformers.
As an underlying component of the proposed methods, the dissertation introduces some new insights into the uniform array with broadband beamforming. In this context, a function formulating the relations between the sensor coefficients and its beam pattern over frequency is proposed. The function mainly contains the coordinate transform and inverse Fourier transform.
Furthermore, from the bijection of the function and broadband beamforming perspective, we propose the lower and upper bounds for the inter-distance of sensors. Within these bounds, the function is a bijective function that can be utilized to design the uniform array with broadband beamforming.
For data-independent beamforming, many studies have focused on optimization procedures to seek the sparse array deployment. This dissertation presents an alternative approach to determine the location of sensors.
Starting with a weight spectrum of a virtual dense and uniform array, some techniques are used, such as analyzing a weight spectrum to determine the critical sensors, applying the clustering technique to group the sensors into different groups and selecting representative sensors for each group.
After the sparse array deployment is specified, the optimization technique is applied to find the beamformer coefficients. The proposed method helps to save the computation time in the design phase and its beamformer performance outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in several aspects such as the higher white noise gain, higher directivity factor or more frequency-independence.
For adaptive beamforming, the dissertation attempts to design a versatile sparse microphone array that can be used for different beam patterns.
Furthermore, we aim to reduce the number of microphones in the sparse array while ensuring that its performance can continue to compete with a highly dense and uniform array in terms of broadband beamforming.
An irregular microphone array in a planar surface with the maximum number of distinct distances between the microphones is proposed.
It is demonstrated that the irregular microphone array is well-suited to sparse recovery algorithms that are used to solve underdetermined systems with subject to sparse solutions. Here, a sparse solution is the sound source's spatial spectrum that need to be reconstructed from microphone signals.
From the reconstructed sound sources, a method for array interpolation is presented to obtain an interpolated dense and uniform microphone array that performs well with broadband beamforming.
In addition, two alternative approaches for generalized sidelobe canceler (GSC) beamformer are proposed. One is the data-independent beamforming variant, the other is the adaptive beamforming variant. The GSC decomposes beamforming into two paths: The upper path is to preserve the desired signal, the lower path is to suppress the desired signal. From a beam pattern viewpoint, we propose an improvement for GSC, that is, instead of using the blocking matrix in the lower path to suppress the desired signal, we design a beamformer that contains the nulls at the look direction and at some other directions. Both approaches are simple beamforming design methods and they can be applied to either sparse array or uniform array.
Lastly, a new technique for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation based on the annihilating filter is also presented in this dissertation.
It is based on the idea of finite rate of innovation to reconstruct the stream of Diracs, that is, identifying an annihilating filter/locator filter for a few uniform samples and the position of the Diracs are then related to the roots of the filter. Here, an annihilating filter is the filter that suppresses the signal, since its coefficient vector is always orthogonal to every frame of signal.
In the DOA context, we regard an active source as a Dirac associated with the arrival direction, then the directions of active sources can be derived from the roots of the annihilating filter. However,
the DOA obtained by this method is sensitive to noise and the number of DOAs is limited.
To address these issues, the dissertation proposes a robust method to design the annihilating filter and to increase the degree-of-freedom of the measurement system (more active sources can be detected) via observing multiple data frames.
Furthermore, we also analyze the performance of DOA with diffuse noise and propose an extended multiple signal classification algorithm that takes diffuse noise into account. In the simulation,
it shows, that in the case of diffuse noise, only the extended multiple signal classification algorithm can estimate the DOAs properly.
For many years real-time task models have focused the timing constraints on execution windows defined by earliest start times and deadlines for feasibility.
However, the utility of some application may vary among scenarios which yield correct behavior, and maximizing this utility improves the resource utilization.
For example, target sensitive applications have a target point where execution results in maximized utility, and an execution window for feasibility.
Execution around this point and within the execution window is allowed, albeit at lower utility.
The intensity of the utility decay accounts for the importance of the application.
Examples of such applications include multimedia and control; multimedia application are very popular nowadays and control applications are present in every automated system.
In this thesis, we present a novel real-time task model which provides for easy abstractions to express the timing constraints of target sensitive RT applications: the gravitational task model.
This model uses a simple gravity pendulum (or bob pendulum) system as a visualization model for trade-offs among target sensitive RT applications.
We consider jobs as objects in a pendulum system, and the target points as the central point.
Then, the equilibrium state of the physical problem is equivalent to the best compromise among jobs with conflicting targets.
Analogies with well-known systems are helpful to fill in the gap between application requirements and theoretical abstractions used in task models.
For instance, the so-called nature algorithms use key elements of physical processes to form the basis of an optimization algorithm.
Examples include the knapsack problem, traveling salesman problem, ant colony optimization, and simulated annealing.
We also present a few scheduling algorithms designed for the gravitational task model which fulfill the requirements for on-line adaptivity.
The scheduling of target sensitive RT applications must account for timing constraints, and the trade-off among tasks with conflicting targets.
Our proposed scheduling algorithms use the equilibrium state concept to order the execution sequence of jobs, and compute the deviation of jobs from their target points for increased system utility.
The execution sequence of jobs in the schedule has a significant impact on the equilibrium of jobs, and dominates the complexity of the problem --- the optimum solution is NP-hard.
We show the efficacy of our approach through simulations results and 3 target sensitive RT applications enhanced with the gravitational task model.
A Multi-Sensor Intelligent Assistance System for Driver Status Monitoring and Intention Prediction
(2017)
Advanced sensing systems, sophisticated algorithms, and increasing computational resources continuously enhance the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). To date, despite that some vehicle based approaches to driver fatigue/drowsiness detection have been realized and deployed, objectively and reliably detecting the fatigue/drowsiness state of driver without compromising driving experience still remains challenging. In general, the choice of input sensorial information is limited in the state-of-the-art work. On the other hand, smart and safe driving, as representative future trends in the automotive industry worldwide, increasingly demands the new dimensional human-vehicle interactions, as well as the associated behavioral and bioinformatical data perception of driver. Thus, the goal of this research work is to investigate the employment of general and custom 3D-CMOS sensing concepts for the driver status monitoring, and to explore the improvement by merging/fusing this information with other salient customized information sources for gaining robustness/reliability. This thesis presents an effective multi-sensor approach with novel features to driver status monitoring and intention prediction aimed at drowsiness detection based on a multi-sensor intelligent assistance system -- DeCaDrive, which is implemented on an integrated soft-computing system with multi-sensing interfaces in a simulated driving environment. Utilizing active illumination, the IR depth camera of the realized system can provide rich facial and body features in 3D in a non-intrusive manner. In addition, steering angle sensor, pulse rate sensor, and embedded impedance spectroscopy sensor are incorporated to aid in the detection/prediction of driver's state and intention. A holistic design methodology for ADAS encompassing both driver- and vehicle-based approaches to driver assistance is discussed in the thesis as well. Multi-sensor data fusion and hierarchical SVM techniques are used in DeCaDrive to facilitate the classification of driver drowsiness levels based on which a warning can be issued in order to prevent possible traffic accidents. The realized DeCaDrive system achieves up to 99.66% classification accuracy on the defined drowsiness levels, and exhibits promising features such as head/eye tracking, blink detection, gaze estimation that can be utilized in human-vehicle interactions. However, the driver's state of "microsleep" can hardly be reflected in the sensor features of the implemented system. General improvements on the sensitivity of sensory components and on the system computation power are required to address this issue. Possible new features and development considerations for DeCaDrive are discussed as well in the thesis aiming to gain market acceptance in the future.
At present the standardization of third generation (3G) mobile radio systems is the subject of worldwide research activities. These systems will cope with the market demand for high data rate services and the system requirement for exibility concerning the offered services and the transmission qualities. However, there will be de ciencies with respect to high capacity, if 3G mobile radio systems exclusively use single antennas. Very promising technique developed for increasing the capacity of 3G mobile radio systems the application is adaptive antennas. In this thesis, the benefits of using adaptive antennas are investigated for 3G mobile radio systems based on Time Division CDMA (TD-CDMA), which forms part of the European 3G mobile radio air interface standard adopted by the ETSI, and is intensively studied within the standardization activities towards a worldwide 3G air interface standard directed by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project). One of the most important issues related to adaptive antennas is the analysis of the benefits of using adaptive antennas compared to single antennas. In this thesis, these bene ts are explained theoretically and illustrated by computer simulation results for both data detection, which is performed according to the joint detection principle, and channel estimation, which is applied according to the Steiner estimator, in the TD-CDMA uplink. The theoretical explanations are based on well-known solved mathematical problems. The simulation results illustrating the benefits of adaptive antennas are produced by employing a novel simulation concept, which offers a considerable reduction of the simulation time and complexity, as well as increased exibility concerning the use of different system parameters, compared to the existing simulation concepts for TD-CDMA. Furthermore, three novel techniques are presented which can be used in systems with adaptive antennas for additionally improving the system performance compared to single antennas. These techniques concern the problems of code-channel mismatch, of user separation in the spatial domain, and of intercell interference, which, as it is shown in the thesis, play a critical role on the performance of TD-CDMA with adaptive antennas. Finally, a novel approach for illustrating the performance differences between the uplink and downlink of TD-CDMA based mobile radio systems in a straightforward manner is presented. Since a cellular mobile radio system with adaptive antennas is considered, the ultimate goal is the investigation of the overall system efficiency rather than the efficiency of a single link. In this thesis, the efficiency of TD-CDMA is evaluated through its spectrum efficiency and capacity, which are two closely related performance measures for cellular mobile radio systems. Compared to the use of single antennas, the use of adaptive antennas allows impressive improvements of both spectrum efficiency and capacity. Depending on the mobile radio channel model and the user velocity, improvement factors range from six to 10.7 for the spectrum efficiency, and from 6.7 to 12.6 for the spectrum capacity of TD-CDMA. Thus, adaptive antennas constitute a promising technique for capacity increase of future mobile communications systems.
Real-time systems are systems that have to react correctly to stimuli from the environment within given timing constraints.
Today, real-time systems are employed everywhere in industry, not only in safety-critical systems but also in, e.g., communication, entertainment, and multimedia systems.
With the advent of multicore platforms, new challenges on the efficient exploitation of real-time systems have arisen:
First, there is the need for effective scheduling algorithms that feature low overheads to improve the use of the computational resources of real-time systems.
The goal of these algorithms is to ensure timely execution of tasks, i.e., to provide runtime guarantees.
Additionally, many systems require their scheduling algorithm to flexibly react to unforeseen events.
Second, the inherent parallelism of multicore systems leads to contention for shared hardware resources and complicates system analysis.
At any time, multiple applications run with varying resource requirements and compete for the scarce resources of the system.
As a result, there is a need for an adaptive resource management.
Achieving and implementing an effective and efficient resource management is a challenging task.
The main goal of resource management is to guarantee a minimum resource availability to real-time applications.
A further goal is to fulfill global optimization objectives, e.g., maximization of the global system performance, or the user perceived quality of service.
In this thesis, we derive methods based on the slot shifting algorithm.
Slot shifting provides flexible scheduling of time-constrained applications and can react to unforeseen events in time-triggered systems.
For this reason, we aim at designing slot shifting based algorithms targeted for multicore systems to tackle the aforementioned challenges.
The main contribution of this thesis is to present two global slot shifting algorithms targeted for multicore systems.
Additionally, we extend slot shifting algorithms to improve their runtime behavior, or to handle non-preemptive firm aperiodic tasks.
In a variety of experiments, the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithms are evaluated and confirmed.
Finally, the thesis presents an implementation of a slot-shifting-based logic into a resource management framework for multicore systems.
Thus, the thesis closes the circle and successfully bridges the gap between real-time scheduling theory and real-world implementations.
We prove applicability of the slot shifting algorithm to effectively and efficiently perform adaptive resource management on multicore systems.
The recently established technologies in the areas of distributed measurement and intelligent
information processing systems, e.g., Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), Ambient
Intelligence/Ambient Assisted Living systems (AmI/AAL), the Internet of Things
(IoT), and Industry 4.0 have increased the demand for the development of intelligent
integrated multi-sensory systems as to serve rapid growing markets [1, 2]. These increase
the significance of complex measurement systems, that incorporate numerous advanced
methodological implementations including electronics circuit, signal processing,
and multi-sensory information fusion. In particular, in multi-sensory cognition applications,
to design such systems, the skill-required tasks, e.g., method selection, parameterization,
model analysis, and processing chain construction are elaborated with immense
effort, which conventionally are done manually by the expert designer. Moreover, the
strong technological competition imposes even more complicated design problems with
multiple constraints, e.g., cost, speed, power consumption,
exibility, and reliability.
Thus, the conventional human expert based design approach may not be able to cope
with the increasing demand in numbers, complexity, and diversity. To alleviate the issue,
the design automation approach has been the topic for numerous research works [3-14]
and has been commercialized to several products [15-18]. Additionally, the dynamic
adaptation of intelligent multi-sensor systems is the potential solution for developing
dependable and robust systems. Intrinsic evolution approach and self-x properties [19],
which include self-monitoring, -calibrating/trimming, and -healing/repairing, are among
the best candidates for the issue. Motivated from the ongoing research trends and based
on the background of our research work [12, 13] among the pioneers in this topic, the
research work of the thesis contributes to the design automation of intelligent integrated
multi-sensor systems.
In this research work, the Design Automation for Intelligent COgnitive system with self-
X properties, the DAICOX, architecture is presented with the aim of tackling the design
effort and to providing high quality and robust solutions for multi-sensor intelligent
systems. Therefore, the DAICOX architecture is conceived with the defined goals as
listed below.
Perform front to back complete processing chain design with automated method
selection and parameterization,
Provide a rich choice of pattern recognition methods to the design method pool,
Associate design information via interactive user interface and visualization along
with intuitive visual programming,
Deliver high quality solutions outperforming conventional approaches by using
multi-objective optimization,
Gain the adaptability, reliability and robustness of designed solutions with self-x
properties,
Derived from the goals, several scientific methodological developments and implementations,
particularly in the areas of pattern recognition and computational intelligence,
will be pursued as part of the DAICOX architecture in the research work of this thesis.
The method pool is aimed to contain a rich choice of methods and algorithms covering
data acquisition and sensor configuration, signal processing and feature computation,
dimensionality reduction, and classification. These methods will be selected and parameterized
automatically by the DAICOX design optimization to construct a multi-sensory
cognition processing chain. A collection of non-parametric feature quality assessment
functions for the purpose of Dimensionality Reduction (DR) process will be presented.
In addition, to standard DR methods, the variations of feature selection method, in
particular, feature weighting will be proposed. Three different classification categories
shall be incorporated in the method pool. Hierarchical classification approach will be
proposed and developed to serve as a multi-sensor fusion architecture at the decision
level. Beside multi-class classification, one-class classification methods, e.g., One-Class
SVM and NOVCLASS will be presented to extend functionality of the solutions, in particular,
anomaly and novelty detection. DAICOX is conceived to effectively handle the
problem of method selection and parameter setting for a particular application yielding
high performance solutions. The processing chain construction tasks will be carried
out by meta-heuristic optimization methods, e.g., Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Particle
Swarm Optimization (PSO), with multi-objective optimization approach and model
analysis for robust solutions. In addition, to the automated system design mechanisms,
DAICOX will facilitate the design tasks with intuitive visual programming and various
options of visualization. Design database concept of DAICOX is aimed to allow the
reusability and extensibility of the designed solutions gained from previous knowledge.
Thus, the cooperative design of machine and knowledge from the design expert can also
be utilized for obtaining fully enhanced solutions. In particular, the integration of self-x
properties as well as intrinsic optimization into the system is proposed to gain enduring
reliability and robustness. Hence, DAICOX will allow the inclusion of dynamically
reconfigurable hardware instances to the designed solutions in order to realize intrinsic
optimization and self-x properties.
As a result from the research work in this thesis, a comprehensive intelligent multisensor
system design architecture with automated method selection, parameterization,
and model analysis is developed with compliance to open-source multi-platform software.It is integrated with an intuitive design environment, which includes visual programming
concept and design information visualizations. Thus, the design effort is minimized as
investigated in three case studies of different application background, e.g., food analysis
(LoX), driving assistance (DeCaDrive), and magnetic localization. Moreover, DAICOX
achieved better quality of the solutions compared to the manual approach in all cases,
where the classification rate was increased by 5.4%, 0.06%, and 11.4% in the LoX,
DeCaDrive, and magnetic localization case, respectively. The design time was reduced
by 81.87% compared to the conventional approach by using DAICOX in the LoX case
study. At the current state of development, a number of novel contributions of the thesis
are outlined below.
Automated processing chain construction and parameterization for the design of
signal processing and feature computation.
Novel dimensionality reduction methods, e.g., GA and PSO based feature selection
and feature weighting with multi-objective feature quality assessment.
A modification of non-parametric compactness measure for feature space quality
assessment.
Decision level sensor fusion architecture based on proposed hierarchical classification
approach using, i.e., H-SVM.
A collection of one-class classification methods and a novel variation, i.e.,
NOVCLASS-R.
Automated design toolboxes supporting front to back design with automated
model selection and information visualization.
In this research work, due to the complexity of the task, neither all of the identified goals
have been comprehensively reached yet nor has the complete architecture definition been
fully implemented. Based on the currently implemented tools and frameworks, ongoing
development of DAICOX is pursuing towards the complete architecture. The potential
future improvements are the extension of method pool with a richer choice of methods
and algorithms, processing chain breeding via graph based evolution approach, incorporation
of intrinsic optimization, and the integration of self-x properties. According to
these features, DAICOX will improve its aptness in designing advanced systems to serve
the increasingly growing technologies of distributed intelligent measurement systems, in
particular, CPS and Industrie 4.0.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are dynamically-arranged networks typically composed of a large number of arbitrarily-distributed sensor nodes with computing capabilities contributing to –at least– one common application. The main characteristic of these networks is that of being functionally constrained due to a scarce availability of resources and strong dependence on uncontrollable environmental factors. These conditions introduce severe restrictions on the applicability of classic real-time methods aiming at guaranteeing time-bounded communications. Existing real-time solutions tend to apply concepts that were originally not conceived for sensor networks, idealizing realistic application scenarios and overlooking at important design limitations. This results in a number of misleading practices contributing to approaches of restricted validity in real-world scenarios. Amending the confrontation between WSNs and real-time objectives starts with a review of the basic fundamentals of existing approaches. In doing so, this thesis presents an alternative approach based on a generalized timeliness notion suitable to the particularities of WSNs. The new conceptual notion allows the definition of feasible real-time objectives opening a new scope of possibilities not constrained to idealized systems. The core of this thesis is based on the definition and application of Quality of Service (QoS) trade-offs between timeliness and other significant QoS metrics. The analysis of local and global trade-offs provides a step-by-step methodology identifying the correlations between these quality metrics. This association enables the definition of alternative trade-off configurations (set points) influencing the quality performance of the network at selected instants of time. With the basic grounds established, the above concepts are embedded in a simple routing protocol constituting a proof of concept for the validity of the presented analysis. Extensive evaluations under realistic scenarios are driven on simulation environments as well as real testbeds, validating the consistency of this approach.
Hardware devices fabricated with recent process technology are intrinsically
more susceptible to faults than before. Resilience against hardware faults is,
therefore, a major concern for safety-critical embedded systems and has been
addressed in several standards. These standards demand a systematic and
thorough safety evaluation, especially for the highest safety levels. However,
any attempt to cover all faults for all theoretically possible scenarios that a sys-
tem might be used in can easily lead to excessive costs. Instead, an application-
dependent approach should be taken: strategies for test and fault resilience
must target only those faults that can actually have an effect in the situations
in which the hardware is being used.
In order to provide the data for such safety evaluations, we propose scalable
and formal methods to analyse the effects of hardware faults on hardware/soft-
ware systems across three abstraction levels where we:
(1) perform a fault effect analysis at instruction set architecture level by em-
ploying fault injection into a hardware-dependent software model called
program netlist,
(2) use the results from the program netlist analysis to perform a deductive
analysis to determine “application-redundant” faults at the gate level by
exploiting standard combinational test pattern generation,
(3) use the results from the program netlist analysis to perform an inductive
analysis to identify all faults of a given fault list that can have an effect
on selected objects of the high-level software, such as specified safety
functions, by employing Abstract Interpretation.
These methods aid in the certification process for the higher safety levels
by (a) providing formal guarantees that certain faults can be ignored and (b)
pointing to those faults which need to be detected in order to ensure product
safety.
We consider transient and permanent faults corrupting data in program-
visible hardware registers and model them using the single-event upset and
stuck-at fault models, respectively.
Scalability of our approaches results from combining an analysis at the ma-
chine and hardware level with separate analyses on gate level and C level
source code, as well as, exploiting certain properties that are characteristic for
embedded systems software. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability
of each method on industry-oriented software, including a software system
with about 138 k lines of C code.
Photonic crystals are inhomogeneous dielectric media with periodic variation of the refractive index. A photonic crystal gives us new tools for the manipulation of photons and thus has received great interests in a variety of fields. Photonic crystals are expected to be used in novel optical devices such as thresholdless laser diodes, single-mode light emitting diodes, small waveguides with low-loss sharp bends, small prisms, and small integrated optical circuits. They can be operated in some aspects as "left handed materials" which are capable of focusing transmitted waves into a sub-wavelength spot due to negative refraction. The thesis is focused on the applications of photonic crystals in communications and optical imaging: • Photonic crystal structures for potential dispersion management in optical telecommunication systems • 2D non-uniform photonic crystal waveguides with a square lattice for wide-angle beam refocusing using negative refraction • 2D non-uniform photonic crystal slabs with triangular lattice for all-angle beam refocusing • Compact phase-shifted band-pass transmission filter based on photonic crystals