) or by selecting Upload from the File pull-down menu,
as shown below:A buyer 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. obtains 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. for you by sending bids to a 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 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. or 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. ). agent. You can have your agent bid 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., which normally runs on the same server as the Resource agent. Your Spot-market agent may continue to bid on your behalf from the Garage when you close the agent on your PC (using your current Desktop agent settings). This is known as “uploading” your agent. When you upload your agent, all configuration changes are saved and the agent on your PC is closed.
Unlike a Spot-market agent, there is little harm if you exit a Merkato session without uploading a reservation agent. If you don’t upload your agent you lose the last changes you made in the reservation quote request window, but not the reservations you have already confirmed. Confirmed reservations are stored in a Merkato database, not in your reservation agent profile.
You can upload either by pressing the up-arrow on the icon
bar () or by selecting Upload from the File pull-down menu,
as shown below:
