Abstract
Motivated by the trend for supporting cost-effective resourceusage for data transmission, we consider a threshold type controlmechanism for dynamic setup/release of $\lambda$-channels inoptical networks. There are two types of costs for the controlmechanism: the setup/release cost and the operation cost. Forsuch a control mechanism, there is a corresponding Markov modelwith high complexity. By state aggregation, we are able toidentify a semi-Markov process that is simpler to analyze. Basedon the semi-Markov process, we derive the average cost formulafor the threshold type control mechanism and carry out severalnumerical examples to find the optimal thresholds that minimizethe average cost.