The agent The program that interacts with the rest of Merkato on behalf of buyers and sellers. Buyers can acquire bandwidth by configuring their agents to offer the price they are willing to pay for a range of available quantity, or use their agent to request a quote for a fixed-price bandwidth reservation. Sellers configure their agents with a quantity of bandwidth for sale and a minimum price they are willing to accept for that quantity. window consists of multiple sub-windows that may be displayed, or not displayed, as you wish. The sections below describe the windows, in roughly the order a first-time user might access them.
The Resource The bandwidth service that is offered through a single Merkato marketplace. It will have service attributes, an available quantity earmarked for it by the NSP, and a market mechanism for distributing bandwidth (either the spot market or reservation market). window includes a pull-down menu of the resources available to the agent. It shows the amount of bandwidth The amount of data transmitted or received per unit of time. When we refer to acquiring or selling bandwidth, we mean the amount of information that can be sent over a connection at one time, at the allowed speed, without packet loss or excessive delay. Bandwidth is measured in bits-per-second. available at the resource selected.
Open the Resource window by selecting it from the Selection pull-down menu. If the agent is connected to a resource, the Capacity In the Merkato interface, the term capacity refers to the total amount of bandwidth available from the Seller. display indicates the total amount of bandwidth available for sale (as set by this Seller agent) at that resource.
The Units window lets you select units in which currency, bandwidth, and time are displayed. Units you select appear in the labels of windows as well as in pop-up message screens.
Currency units supported are dollars (“$”) and cents (“c”).
Quantity units supported are kilobits per second (“Kbps”), Megabits per second (“Mbps”), and gigabits per second (“Gbps”).
Time units supported are minutes (“min”), hours (“h”), days (“day”), and months (“month”).
Changes you make to any units take effect immediately. All values in all other windows are automatically scaled to reflect the new units without changing the actual values.
The seller valuation The value a buyer or seller places on bandwidth. Setting a valuation is part of setting a purchasing strategy. Valuation settings within a buyer agent let buyers specify the amount they are willing to pay for varying amounts of bandwidth. This information is used by the agent to respond to changing market conditions during a Merkato progressive second price auction. sets the quantity of bandwidth available in the marketplace and the minimum price at which it will be sold. In an auction, your agent uses this valuation information to determine what quantity can be sold and the floor price The lowest price the seller will accept for bandwidth. The seller can establish the floor price through the Seller agent..
Select the “Current Valuation” radio button label at the top of the window. The valuation must be active for the Seller valuation to take effect. The green arrow in the menu indicates the valuation that is currently active.
Two configurable parameters determine the auction parameters.
• “Qty” sets the current quantity for sale in the marketplace. Your agent offers all this bandwidth to the buyers.
• “Value” sets the minimum amount of money you are willing to accept for the entire “Qty” of bandwidth—the floor price.
Changes to either one of these values take effect immediately.
The floor price is usually refered to as a price per unit of bandwidth. The per-unit floor price is the “Value” divided by the total “Qty.” In the illustration (Figure 14), the floor price is 45 Mbps/$4,500 per month, or $100 per Mbps per month.
Under certain conditions you may not sell all the bandwidth you are offering. These conditions include the following:
If the first condition occurs, you should consider whether your floor price is too high. If the second condition occurs you need to find more buyers. If demand on the reservation market The Merkato market mechanism by which a specified quantity of bandwidth, for a specific duration, is sold for a firm price specified by the seller and agreed to by the buyer. This is an automated process based on a rate sheet that the seller establishes in advance. is high and the second condition occurs, you might consider having your Merkato InvisibleHand's software platform, which dynamically prices, sells, and allocates IP bandwidth in real time. Merkato means "market" in Esperanto. administrator transfer bandwidth from the spot market The Merkato mechanism by which bandwidth is traded, in a progressive second price auction. An optimal fair market price is established and bandwidth is allocated to buyers, based on their bids relative to other buyers. to the reservation market.
Once you have configured your valuation you must configure how your agent uses that information. There are two strategy options you can use in the Spot market: static and dynamic. (See Spot Market Selling Strategy.) A green arrow in the menu-bar list indicates the currently active strategy.
Note: We do not recommend using the Static Seller strategy.
Under static seller pricing, the unit price for all bidders becomes the unit price of the last unit of bandwidth sold. Merkato sets this price via a Seller bidder that always loses at the highest possible price (and for the highest possible quantity) under the Progressive Second Price auction rules. (See Merkato Auction Mechanism: The Progressive Second Price Auction.)
With a Static strategy, the basis of all bidders’ pricing is nearly always the floor price as offered by the seller’s buy-back agent.
Under dynamic seller pricing, the unit price for all bidders is the highest losing bid. Merkato gets this bid via a Seller bidder that always loses at the highest possible price (bid for the highest possible quantity) under the Progressive Second Price auction rules.
With a Static strategy, the basis of all bidders’ pricing is nearly always the floor price, as offered by the seller’s buy-back agent. In the Dynamic strategy, the seller receives the price offered by the lowest successful bidder times the quantity of bandwidth for sale.
The News window provides real-time status of your Merkato agent. It is useful when you want to get a quick summary of marketplace conditions and confirm the state of your agent.
When your agent is disconnected, you see a News display like the one below:
When you are connected but not bidding the News window looks like the one shown below. It indicates the bandwidth capacity you are offered the current market price The price for something that buyers and sellers agree on. Merkato establishes a market price for bandwidth during each spot market auction round. There is a fixed amount for sale, so as demand increases, prices rise. The market price is reached when the cumulative demand of all the buyers is exactly equal to the amount of bandwidth being offered by the seller. of the auction as it is proceeding.
During an auction, the News window looks like the examples below.
For buyers, the Allocation An amount of bandwidth available for your use. Depending on the type of service being offered through Merkato, this can represent the maximum bandwidth available to you or a minimum guarantee of bandwidth available to you. window provides information as to the quantity of bandwidth received and the price paid for that bandwidth at the close of each auction. For sellers (who are not allocated bandwidth) the allocation display is always zero.
The allocation window also provides a time indicator for the current auction. Each time a buyer places a bid the timer is set back. (The administrator can change this time setting.) When all bidders cease bidding (either because they are satisfied with their proposed allocation or have dropped out of the bidding at the current market price), the timer counts down to zero. At that point the Resource agent turns the proposed allocations into real allocations. This occurs during a “pause” period between auction rounds. The pause period is indicated by several changes to the time display: the timer label changes from “Time Left” to “Time Since,” the numbers are shown in red, and the counter counts up to the pause duration limit.
The Auction graph indicates the state of the Merkato auction in progress. Dots indicate current bids. A Buyer agent displays a graph like the following:
For Seller agents, the Auction graph displays fewer elements because allocations are not being made to the seller agent. The display looks like the following:
The graph elements are:
Clicking the right mouse button changes the scale of the unit price axis (Y axis). Note the units on the X axis in the examples shown below. The cursor changes to indicate that the scale is expanded or contracted.
The Auction Table gives you a quantitative, real-time view of the auction in progress. The table below is what a Buyer agent displays.
The table below indicates what a Seller agent displays. It is slightly less complex.
The columns of the Auction table may be resized (by clicking and dragging column boundaries in the header) or reordered (by clicking and dragging the column headers themselves).
The columns in the auction table are as follows:
|
ID |
The ID of the bidder. A bidder agent receives a new ID whenever it is uploaded to or downloaded from the garage A server from which buyer and seller agents can bid when they are not actively bidding on a user's PC desktop. The garage is generally installed on the Merkato server, providing maximum performance and reliability. . |
|
Quantity |
The quantity requested in the last bid placed (note that this may be split into multiple rows, as explained below). |
|
Price |
The price (unit price) requested in the last bid placed. |
|
Rate |
The rate represented by the bid. This is the quantity times the price. It is the maximum cost represented by that bid, but not necessarily the price that will be paid by the bidder. |
The rows in the Auction table can be identified as follows:
|
Your Dynamic Seller agent’s last bid is shown in red. The last bids of all other agents are shown in black (in the blue shaded area) or in yellow (in the black area). |
|
Any bidders that receive an allocation of bandwidth, including your Dynamic Seller agent, are shown in the blue shaded area. Any bidder who does not receive an allocation is shown in the black area. Bidders that receive only a portion of an allocation are shown in both the blue and black areas, with their quantities split accordingly. |
|
Bidders currently unsuccessful in the auction round are shown in the black area. As the price offered by unsuccessful bidders forms the basis for the winning bidders’ cost, the black area represents the basis for the actual cost paid by a buyer whose agent receives an allocation. |
The columns of the Auction table may be resized (by clicking and dragging column boundaries in the header) or reordered (by clicking and dragging the column headers themselves).
The yellow-shaded area in the Rate column indicates the rate offered by bidders unsuccessful in the current round. The rate offered by the highest unsuccessful bidder is the basis of the winners’ cost. The magenta number (in the yellow cell) at the bottom of the table is a calculation of the rate a successful bidder would pay should the auction end immediately. It is based on the rate offered by the highest bidders currently in the black area.
When you are done monitoring your agent on your desktop, you can upload your agent to the garage, where, using an Automatic bidding strategy, it can continue bidding on your behalf.
Use either the up-arrow in the icon bar (
), or the “Upload” menu-bar item in the “File” category to
access this function. You will be presented with a confirmation query
message, as shown below.
The confirmation message indicates the garage into which your agent will move. If you click Cancel you are returned to the Desktop agent and no upload occurs.
The confirmation message indicates whether your agent is bidding. If your agent is stopped when you upload it, the confirmation message looks like the one below. (Notice the red circle in the upper left.)
Make sure the bidding state is Active if you wish to continue
bidding while your agent is in the garage.
Saving your configuration preserves changes to your agent’s profile in the garage while you continue to keep you agent on your desktop. While the agent is active on your desktop there is a non-active profile of the agent’s parameters stored in the garage, which should be kept up do date.
If you don’t keep this configuration up to date you could lose the changes you made to your agent while bidding on your desktop if your desktop is rebooted or crashes before you can upload.
For procedures, see SaveYour Configuration.