Setting Your Valuation Strategy

Your bidding strategy can go beyond entering the amount of bandwidth you want and the price you are willing to pay. Using the Traffic-based tab, you can set your agent to change the bandwidth it bids for as your traffic changes.

You may specify that you want a maximum quantity that is greater than the quantity the seller is offering.

You might do this in case the seller decides to offer more bandwidth later. You may also do this because you prefer the resulting bid curve (especially when you are using logarithmic or parabolic valuation and you want to move your most aggressive bidding point closer to a desired value).

Your agent will still begin bidding at the amount the seller is offering, at the unit price indicated from your valuation curve.

Traffic-Based Bidding

Each valuation window has a Traffic-based tab, and each one serves the same function.

If you use the Traffic-based tab in the valuation window, your agent changes its maximum quantity by checking the usage at intervals.

Meas. Window¾The Measurement Window. Your agent continuously measures the amount of traffic you generate in five minute increments. The measurement window setting tells the agent, in minutes, how far back in time to look for the peak five minute interval. The smallest interval you can select is six minutes. Unless your Merkato administrator has changed this, the largest allowed interval is 200 minutes (in other words, the peak of the last 40 five-minute traffic samples). 

Meas. Traffic¾Measured Traffic (Display Only field). The peak amount of traffic the agent measures at the interval you set in the Meas. Window field. Merkato uses this peak five-minute interval as the basis for the “Max Quantity Requested” calculation. (See below.)

Qty Margin¾Quantity Margin.  This is the amount of bandwidth your agent will attempt to obtain above that of the recent measured peak.  There are many reasons why you would like to obtain more bandwidth than your recent measured peak.  The most significant is that you will not be able to measure peak traffic above your most recently measured peak if your allocation only allows that amount of traffic to pass through the Merkato system (it becomes a self-fulfilling prediction).   Similarly, if your traffic goes to zero for any length of time, your agent would start to ask for zero allocation and you would never be able to increase your allocation beyond this value. Select your Quantity Margin to be the maximum expected jump of traffic within a 5 minute period. 

Max Qty Requested¾Maximum Quantity Requested (Display Only field). The Merkato agent adds the measured traffic to the Qty Margin to create this number. This is the value that is carried forward into the main valuation calculation. It is called “Maximum Quantity Requested” because Merkato compares to the “Max Qty” value in the main valuation window. Merkato uses whichever value is smaller as the basis for the maximum quantity requested. (In other words, traffic-based settings can only reduce the amount of bandwidth you ask for relative to the main valuation settings¾they will never increase it). Note that the “Max Qty Requested” value only changes the initial bidding point. Should your offered bid price be insufficient to get that amount of bandwidth, your agent uses your pre-determined valuation curve below that value to attempt to obtain as much bandwidth as possible.

Active check box¾Checking this box starts Traffic-based bidding on your agent.

Apply¾Clicking Apply makes the numbers entered in the fields of the Traffic-based window active.

 

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