The Effect of Management Structure on the Performance of
Izhak Rubin
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of California at Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90024
Teresa Cheng
System Performance Group
Northern Telecom, Inc.
685A E. Middlefield Road
Mountain View, California 94039
Abstract
A multi-layer model is used to study the effect of management
structure on the performance of connection-oriented packet-switched networks
managed via fixed threshold call admission policies. Call admission decisions are
based on estimates of the number and characteristics of currently held calls,
which may be inaccurate due to uncertainties in the measurement process or to
the use of untimely information. Let the state estimate be represented as the
true state value offset by a noise factor. The standard deviation of the
estimation error serves as a key parameter in representing the complexity, coverage,
extensiveness, and cost of the implemented network management and information collection
procedure. For a single-domain network the effect of Gaussian noise on blocking,
throughput, and the probability of excess calls are examined and used to define a
measure of performance, the throughput capacity trajectory, which gives maximum
throughput levels for fixed packet blocking, packet delay, and probability of excess
call constrains. In a multi-domain network a particular network
manager/controller may have complete information about its own domain, but limited,
aggregated, or untimely information about other domains. Tradeoffs between
centralized and distributed decision-making are discussed and a mechanism is provided
for comparing various management structures as well as determining good
values for admission control thresholds.
Keywords: multi-domain performance management; admission control; packet-switched
networks; incomplete information.
JNSM: Vol. 1, No. 1, 1993
The Effect of Management Structure on the Performance of [Vol. 1, No. 1, 1993]
NOTE: only abstract of paper available on-line
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