J. Sairamesh and D. F. Ferguson
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
30, Saw Mill River Rd.
Hawthorne, New York, 10532
We consider a market economy for computational services in large networks and information systems. The economy consists of three kinds of players: suppliers (e.g. backbone providers) who sell computational resources such as network bandwidth/buffers and switch processing, brokers (e.g. Internet Service Providers) who buy resources from suppliers and resell them in the form of multiple qualities of service, and consumers who buy services from brokers based on their Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and willingness to pay. In this talk, we will show the following: optimal allocation of resources, price stability, decentralized control of resources and services, and the dynamics of broker price and quality differentiation. We will also present the design of flexible, distributed markets (based on Java and CORBA) for trading network services in a federated environment like the Internet.
Dr. Jakka Sairamesh is a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, New York. His areas of interest include Electronic Commerce, Economics of the Internet and Information, Computational Economies, Distributed Objects, and Resource Allocation in Distributed Systems. Dr. Sairamesh received his Ph.D from Columbia University in 1996.Dr. Donald F. Ferguson is a manager at IBM T. J. Watson Research, Hawthorne, New York. He is a distinguished engineer of the IBM Architecture and Application Enabling and Integration Department. He is also a distinguished member of the IBM Academy for Technology. His areas of interest include Distributed Object Frameworks, Distributed and Fault-Tolerant Transaction Processing, Computational and Information Economies. Dr. Ferguson received his PhD from Columbia University in 1988. He has published numerous papers in the areas of Transaction Processing, Databases, Computational Economies and Distributed Objects.