Utility Driven Mobile-Agent Scheduling
Jonathan L. Bredin, David F. Kotz, Daniela L. Rus · 2005
Mobile agents are programs capable of migrating from one host machine to another. We propose that mobile agents purchase resource access rights from host machines thereby establishing a market for computational resources and giving agents a metric to evenly distribute themselves throughout the network. Market participation requires quantitative information about resource consumption to define demand and calculate utility. We create a formal utility model to derive user-demand functions, allowing agents to efficiently plan expenditure and deal with price fluctuations. By quantifying demand and utility, resource owners can precisely set a value for a good. We simulate our model in a mobile agent scheduling environment and show how mobile agents may use server prices to distribute themselves evenly throughout a network. 1 Introduction Mobile agents are programs that may, under their own volition, jump from one host and resume execution at another host. We propose using electronic Revi...