Software agents and the role of market protocols

A crucial need exists for innovative means to access, secure, and maintain distributed or networked resources such as those found on the Internet. Instead of centralized controllers, schedulers, and priority schemes, we advocate the use of decentralized approaches such as software agents with autonomous protocols. We have proposed protocols for agents which represent tasks that negotiate to gain access to computing resources such as Web files, graphics processors, databases, special output devices, etc. Four different market protocols have been developed (single action, auction, barter, and challenge), and through simulation, associated system performance has been analyzed by monitoring agent and task performance; viz, processing times, total system times, resource availability, resource utilization, and system efficiency. Experimental results show that agents using market protocols are more effective than the standard hosted approaches, encouraging their possible further exploration into non-von Neumann architectures and hostless network operating systems.