A study on traffic forecast of optical access network considering the multiple usage

Abstract

As the demand of Internet access increases, faster networks are needed and optical access networks become more essential. It is very important to estimate the number of subscribers and the traffic demand for efficient network constructions. Moreover traffic demand forecast is also very important for production of the proper network equipment, because it takes 2 or 3 years to develop new network equipment. In this paper, main application services are chosen to forecast optical access network traffic by using derived demand method. Twelve kinds of main residential application services and seven kinds of main business application services are selected through a literature survey, brainstorming, and Delphi analysis. With binary logistic regression analysis, this paper predicts the scale of subscription, and forecasts the traffic from 2005 to 2011 of optical access network. For a more exact forecast, this paper considers the multiple usages. Future application services, because of their characteristics, have high probability of being used simultaneously with other services in the same interface. This paper surveys among their subscribing services which services are used simultaneously with other services. It is found that total traffic of each residential subscriber would reach a maximum of 23.4Mbps, a minimum of 8.9Mbps, and most likely 12.6Mbps in 2005. This increase of traffic suggests that the optical access network should be constructed in the near future. This paper also analyzes the busy hour traffics. It finds that the busy period of the optical access networks occurs between 22:00 and 23:00 in Korea, and the traffic during this busy period represents 13 percent of the total traffic. On the other hand, this paper studies about household portions according to their demand for bandwidth. Most subscribers requires between 10 and 30Mbps. However, 20.5% of subscribing households requires high bandwidth over 50Mbps in 2005. Thus, immediate conversion int...