Market-based control of mobile-agent systems.
Jonathan L. Bredin · 2001
Modern distributed systems scatter sensors, storage, and computation throughout the environment. Ideally these devices communicate and share resources, but there is seldom motivation for a device's owner to yield control to another user. We establish markets for computational resources to motivate principals to share resources with arbitrary users, to enforce priority in distributed systems, to provide flexible and rational limitations on the potential of an application, and to provide a lightweight structure to balance the workload over time and between devices. As proof of concept, we implement a structure software agents can use to discover and negotiate access to networked resources. The structure separates discovery, authentication, and consumption enforcement as separate orthogonal issues to give system designers flexibility. Mobile agents