Resource Billing in Mobile Agent Based Heterogeneous Distributed Information Systems
Martin Pirotta, Arkady Zaslavsky · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2003
The research of billing schemes for computational resources is fundamental to information economy. Software \tagents that roam the Internet are consumers of resources. In this paper we first outline the surgeoncy of \tinformation economy as a result of computational resources being made available to the general public and \ttheir software agents. We propose a billing scheme for the usage of such resources using e-wallets and Internet \tdollars. The proposed billing scheme is applied to a community of mobile agents that live, and roam across a \tnumber of nodes, which provide the necessary resources and services used by these agents. An integrated \tservice is charged at a dynamically computed rate at the end of a provider and agent negotiation phase. The \tpaper also puts forward ways of achieving secure and reliable payments. The prototype implementation of a \tsimulator is also discussed.