Market-based resource control for mobile agents
Jonathan L. Bredin, David F. Kotz, Daniela L. Rus · 1998
Mobile agents are programs that can migrate from machine to machine in a heterogeneous, partially disconnected network. As mobile agents move across a network, they consume resources. We discuss a system for controlling the activities of mobile agents that uses electronic cash, a banking system, and a set of resource managers. We describe protocols for transactions between agents. We present fixed-pricing and dynamic-pricing policies for resources. We focus on and analyze the sealed-bid second-price auction as a mechanism for dynamic pricing. 1 Introduction Mobile agents are programs that can migrate from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. The program chooses when and where to migrate. It can suspend its execution at an arbitrary point, jump to another machine and resume execution on the new machine. Thus, mobile agents co-locate data and computation by bringing the computation to the data, rather than by bringing the data to the computation. Agents have the necessary auto...