My deepest gratitude is to my Ph.D. adviser, Prof. Chung-Horng Lung, Carleton University, Canada. I have been amazingly fortunate to have an adviser who gave me the freedom to explore, and at the same time the guidance to recover when my steps faltered. I am grateful to him for holding me to a high research standard and enforcing strict validations for each research result, and thus teaching me how to do the research.