By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

Homegrown technologies for next generation networking (NGN) and Internet protocol television (IPTV) were approved as international industry standards at a recent International Telecommunication Union (ITU) meeting, a state-run high-tech institute said Wednesday.

The ITU's telecommunication standardization body approved three designs developed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and local researchers submitted during its meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, last month, the ETRI said.

The technologies are focused on improving the handover between different access networks for handheld devices, which would be critical amid the strengthening trend of convergence between telecommunications and broadcasting services.

The designs include solutions for controlling handover between fixed-line and wireless networks, improving handover of data carried through multi-protocol labels switching (MPLS) and also technology to handle the verification process of users switching networks.

The ETRI has been focusing on developing technologies involved in the transition toward NGN, a broad term describing the recent evolvement in telecommunication core and access networks. The eventual objective of NGN is the delivery of all information and services, including voice, data and video, on a single network by moving these in packets, much alike Internet data transfers.

Improving handover technologies is more of an immediate matter in Korea, which is about to launch commercial IPTV services, which provide conventional television and other interactive features like video-on-demand over broadband networks.

WiBro, the Korean version of mobile WiMAX, designed to provide broadband speeds to users on the move, could also gain a bigger audience with the government allowing the network to support telephony services.

Eventually, mobile users will be able to move between WiBro and third-generation (3G) telephony networks on a single device, making handover a critical matter.

``IPTV will evolve in a way where it would be delivered in mobile devices, and providing seamless connection between different devices, such as the television at home and T.V.-enabled mobile phones, is critical,'' said Lyu Won, the director of ETRI's convergence media research division.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr