Network management information for light-path assessment: trade-off between performance and complexity

Network management information for light-path assessment to dynamically set up end-to-end lightpaths across administrative domains is investigated. Our focus is on investigating what performance can be possibly achieved given partial management information, and whether a small loss in performance can trade off with a large saving in management information. The partial information we consider includes aggregated characterization of subnetworks, and local states from wavelength converters. We cast the light-path assessment as a decision problem, and define the performance as the probability of an erroneous decision. We apply the decision theory to show that the optimal performance using the partial information is the Bayes probability of error. We derive an upper bound of the Bayes error in terms of the blocking probability. We evaluate the upper bound using both independent and dependent models of wavelength usage. Our study shows that there exits a "threshold effect": the Bayes error decreases exponentially to 0 with respect to the load when the load is either below or above a threshold value; and is nonnegligible when the load is in a small duration around the threshold. This suggests that a small percentage of error decisions can trade off with a large saving in management information.