2021/05/14 by Dao Thanh Hai, Hai, Dao Thanh
Engineering · #Advanced Optical Network Technologies #Advanced Photonic Communication Systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Optical Network Technologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2105.07088
openalex publication_date 2021/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This non-conventional paper represents the first attempt to uncover a\npossible vulnerability in some proposals for optical network designs and\nperformance comparisons. While optical network designs and planning lie at the\nheart of achieving fiber capacity efficiency and/or operational efficiency, its\ncombinatorial nature makes it computationally hard to reach optimal solutions\nfor realistic scenarios. Therefore, the well-established way that have been\ntaken for granted by not-so-small number of research papers is that an\noptimization model based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is first\nproposed and then due to the intractability of such combinatorial model, an\nheuristic algorithm is offered as an approximation. The solution-quality\ncomparison between the MILP and heuristic is then carried out on small-scale\ninstances including topologies and traffic tests to verify the efficacy of the\nproposed heuristic and the next step is to use such allegedly verified\nheuristic for optical network designs of realistic scenarios. This approach may\nnevertheless leave a critical vulnerability as there is no guarantee that one\nperforms well in small tests will generalize adequately for large-scale cases,\na common pitfall widely referred as the peril of extrapolation and/or\noverfitting. Besides, it is not uncommon that in some research works, for\nbenchmarking purpose, the comparison between a new design proposal whose\nperformance is obtained from on one heuristic and a reference design based on\nanother heuristic is carried out. As the result of missing solution quality\ncheck, such performance comparison relied merely on heuristic solutions may be\nequally vulnerable as its results can be distorted and thus, be far from the\npossibly achieved zones. In this work, we pinpoint those issues and provide a\nrealistic case study to highlight and demonstrate the impact of such\nvulnerabilities.\n