• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.21
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• pp.3-37
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• 2003

English law accepts the basic principle of freedom of contract that the parties should be free to agree on any terms that they like unless their agreement is illegal or otherwise contrary to public policy because it infringes some public interest. On the other hand, it has been limited for hundreds of years on the basis that certain contract terms, particularly in standard form, may alter a distribution of risks that the customer would reasonably intended. The alteration may often result from his simple ignorance caused by either lack of opportunity to become aware of clauses or inability to understand their full potential implications. In addition, it may also result from disparity in bargaining power which does not allow the customer to look after their own interests even if he is fully aware of the unacceptable clauses. In response to this problem, English law has employed both judicial and statutory intervention techniques to control unfair contract terms. This study describes and analyzes in detail how English law regulates such terms, particularly, in standard form, in order to provide legal advice to our sellers residing either in UK or in Korea who plan to enter into UK markets. It also attempts to explore any problem in the existing double legislations of UCTA and UTCCR and put forward future direction of English law in light of the Draft Unfair Terms Bill which was currently proposed by the Law Commissioners. The main concern of this paper will be confined to some of the various aspects of both judicial and statutory control of unfair contract terms in English law which may draw our attention in terms of domestic or international business sales.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.774-784
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• 2009

A wireless sensor network consisting of a large number of nodes with limited battery power should minimize energy consumption at each node to prolong the network lifetime. To improve the sensitivity of wireless sensor networks, an efficient scheduling algorithm and energy management technology for minimizing the energy consumption at each node is desired. ill this paper, we propose energy-aware routing mechanism for maximum lifetime and to optimize the solution quality for sensor network maintenance and to relay node from its adjacent cluster heads according to the node"s residual energy and its distance to the base station. Proposed protocol may minimize the energy consumption at each node, thus prolong the lifetime of the system regardless of where the sink is located outside or inside the cluster. Simulation results of proposed scheme show that our mechanism balances the energy consumption well among all sensor nodes and achieves an obvious improvement on the network lifetime. To verify propriety using NS-2, proposed scheme constructs sensor networks adapt to current model and evaluate consumption of total energy, energy consumption of cluster head, average energy dissipation over varying network areas with HEED and LEACH-C.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.11B
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• pp.968-980
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• 2008

Providing handover with guaranteed QoS for real-time multimedia service such as VoIP, video/audio streaming, and video conferencing in wireless LAN is a challenging task. In this paper, we present efficient layer 2 handover mechanism in wireless LAN, which can provide fast handover with guaranteed QoS for real-time multimedia service. To this end, the scanning period and the number of channels per scanning for handover are dynamically adapted to the type of applications and wireless networking environment, so that both the degradation of application service quality and signaling overhead are minimized simultaneously. The performance of the proposed mechanism is verified by the simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism guarantess QoS of each multimedia application with minimal power consumption.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.3066-3079
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• 2016

Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in topology research of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where both energy consumption and survivability need careful consideration. To balance energy consumption and ensure survivability against both random failures and deliberate attacks, we resort to complex network theory and propose an energy-aware preferential attachment (EPA) model to generate a robust topology for WSNs. In the proposed model, by taking the transmission range and energy consumption of the sensor nodes into account, we combine the characters of Erdős -Rényi (ER) model and Barabasi-Albert (BA) model in this new model and introduce tunable coefficients for balancing connectivity, energy consumption, and survivability. The correctness of our theoretic analysis is verified by simulation results. We find that the topology of WSNs built by EPA model is asymptotically power-law and can have different characters in connectivity, energy consumption, and survivability by using different coefficients. This model can significantly improve energy efficiency as well as enhance network survivability by changing coefficients according to the requirement of the real environment where WSNs deployed and therefore lead to a crucial improvement of network performance.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.33-39
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• 2008

Energy efficiency should be considered together with performance when designing embedded processors. This paper proposes a new energy-aware instruction cache design using backward branch information to reduce the energy consumption in an embedded processor, since instruction caches consume a significant fraction of the on-chip energy. Proposed instruction cache is composed of two caches: a large main instruction cache and a small loop instruction cache. Proposed technique enables the selective access between the main instruction cache and the loop instruction cache to reduce the number of accesses to the main instruction cache, leading to good energy efficiency. Analysis results show that the proposed instruction cache reduces the energy consumption by 20% on the average, compared to the traditional instruction cache.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.10
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• pp.4883-4901
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• 2016

Energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is very appealing research area due to serious constrains on resources like storage, processing, and communication power of the sensor nodes. Due to limited capabilities of sensing nodes, such networks are composed of a large number of nodes. The higher number of nodes increases the overall performance in data collection from environment and transmission of packets among nodes. In such networks the nodes sense data and ultimately forward the information to a Base Station (BS). The main issues in WSNs revolve around energy consumption and delay in relaying of data. A lot of research work has been published in this area of achieving energy efficiency in the network. Various techniques have been proposed to divide such networks; like grid division of network, group based division, clustering, making logical layers of network, variable size clusters or groups and so on. In this paper a new technique of group based WSNs is proposed by using some features from recent published protocols i.e. "Energy-Efficient Multi-level and Distance Aware Clustering (EEMDC)" and "Energy-Efficient Multi-level and Distance Aware Clustering (EEUC)". The proposed work is not only energy-efficient but also minimizes the delay in relaying of data from the sensor nodes to BS. Simulation results show, that it outperforms LEACH protocol by 38%, EEMDC by 10% and EEUC by 13%.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.572-580
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• 2021

In order to reduce transmission delay and increase reliability in networks, mainly high-performance and high-power network equipment is used to guarantee network quality. In this paper, we propose an optimization algorithm to minimize the energy consumed when transmitting traffic in networks with a bundle link composed of multiple physical cables. The proposed optimization algorithm is a meta-heuristic method, which uses tabu search algorithm. In addition, it is designed to minimize transmission energy by minimizing the cables on the paths of the source and destination nodes for each traffic. In the proposed optimization algorithm, performance evaluation was performed in terms of the number of cables used in the transmission and the link utilization for all traffic on networks, and the performance evaluation result confirmed the superior performance than the previously proposed method.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.2605-2625
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• 2024

Siamese-based segmentation and tracking algorithms improve accuracy and stability for video object segmentation and tracking tasks simultaneously. Although effective, variability in target appearance and background clutter can still affect segmentation accuracy and further influence the performance of tracking. In this paper, we present a memory propagation-based target-aware and mask-attention decision network for robust object segmentation and tracking. Firstly, a mask propagation-based attention module (MPAM) is constructed to explore the inherent correlation among image frames, which can mine mask information of the historical frames. By retrieving a memory bank (MB) that stores features and binary masks of historical frames, target attention maps are generated to highlight the target region on backbone features, thus suppressing the adverse effects of background clutter. Secondly, an attention refinement pathway (ARP) is designed to further refine the segmentation profile in the process of mask generation. A lightweight attention mechanism is introduced to calculate the weight of low-level features, paying more attention to low-level features sensitive to edge detail so as to obtain segmentation results. Finally, a mask fusion mechanism (MFM) is proposed to enhance the accuracy of the mask. By utilizing a mask quality assessment decision network, the corresponding quality scores of the "initial mask" and the "previous mask" can be obtained adaptively, thus achieving the assignment of weights and the fusion of masks. Therefore, the final mask enjoys higher accuracy and stability. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our algorithm performs outstanding performance in a variety of challenging tracking tasks.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.477-483
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a distributed user scheduling with interference-aware power control (IAPC) to maximize signal to generating interference plus noise ratio (SGINR) in uplink multi-cell networks. Assuming that the channel reciprocity time-division duplexing (TDD) system is used, the channel state information (CSI) can be obtained at each user from pilot signals from other BSs. In the proposed scheduling, to be specific, each user reduces the transmit power if its generating interference to other BSs is larger than a predetermined threshold. Each BS selects the user with the largest SGINR among users. Simulation results show that the proposed technique significantly outperforms the existing user scheduling algorithms. It is worth noting that the proposed technique operates with distributed manner without information exchange among cells. Hence, it can be easily applied to the practical wireless systems like 3GPP LTE without significant modifications of the specification.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.125-132
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• 2017

Vehicular safety service reduces traffic accidents and traffic congestion by informing drivers in advance of threats that may occur while driving using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications in a wireless environment. For vehicle safety services, every vehicle must broadcasts a Basic Safety Message(BSM) periodically. In congested traffic areas, however, network congestion can easily happen, reduce the message delivery ratio, increase end-to-end delay and destabilize vehicular safety service system. In this paper, to solve the network congestion problem in vehicle safety communications, we approximate the relationship between channel busy ratio and the number of vehicles and use it to estimate the total network congestion. We propose a new context-aware transmit power control algorithm which controls the transmission power based on total network congestion. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using Qualnet, a network simulator. As a result, the estimation of total network congestion is accurately approximated except in specific scenarios, and the packet error rate in vehicle safety communication is reduced through transmit power control.