Access Network Technologies for Broadband Subscriber Services in Korea: Present and Future

摘要

In this paper, we first address the current state of broadband services in Korea. Here, we introduce relevant statistics, current access network architectures, and activities of some major carriers. We also briefly introduce Korean government's policies on research and development projects and plans for promoting the country toward an advanced information society. We then introduce a large-scale, collaborative project named "Photonic Access To the Home (PATH)" with five-year period of performance, started in year 2002. The project is under leadership of the government and ETRI in collaboration with universities and industry. We finally provide a rather detailed description of the FTTH (Fiber To The Home) technology based on the wavelength division multiplexing technology, which has been under research in our laboratory as a part of the PATH project. We show some of our achievement including new architectures and networking principles for the FTTH network, analysis of the dynamic allocation of user bandwidth, and the experiment for a low-cost WDM optical source.