  Resource-constrained systems are prevalent in communications. Such a system
is composed of many components but only some of them can be allocated with
resources such as time slots. According to the amount of information about the
system, algorithms are employed to allocate resources and the overall system
performance depends on the result of resource allocation. We do not always have
complete information, and thus, the system performance may not be satisfactory.
In this work, we propose a general model for the resource-constrained
communication systems. We draw the relationship between system information and
performance and derive the performance bounds for the optimal algorithm for the
system. This gives the expected performance corresponding to the available
information, and we can determine if we should put more efforts to collect more
accurate information before actually constructing an algorithm for the system.
Several examples of applications in communications to the model are also given.
