Choice of Interface

You can choose from among interfaces to set preferences and get information. The User Interface menu gives you three choices.

• The Desktop interface allows you to sell 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. and monitor activity through a series of user-selectable windows. Your 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. is brought to your PC and bids on your behalf from there.
• The Express interface lets you obtain status information from, and send configuration information to, an agent in 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. . The Express interface is displayed on the Portal The unique market mechanism by which Merkato allocates bandwidth to potential buyers at an optimal 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. . An auction is established, where each bid consists of a unit price and the quantity desired at that price. Bidders are ranked according to the unit price they offer. Bidders who get an allocation pay the unit price offered by the lowest accepted bidder. (This is the "second price" aspect of the auction.) Bidders who don't get an allocation can re-bid at a higher unit price, in an attempt to improve their ranking in the auction. (This is the "progressive" aspect of the auction.) An auction round closes when all bidders are either successful, based on their last bid, or cannot match the price offered by the current lowest successful bidder. page upon successful login. The fields on the Express interface are less interactive than the Java-based Merkato Desktop interface.

(The Wizard In Merkato, an automated series of inquiry screens that walks you through the process of creating and configuring a buyer agent.does not currently support seller configuration. If you select the Wizard an error message appears.)

When you are not interacting with your desktop agent you should upload it to the garage. This is critical for Seller agents on the desktop because if the Seller agent ceases to bid from the desktop the auction stops. (See Upload Function.)

Note: Selling From the Garage or From the Desktop

Although the auction 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. process runs continuously, there is no need for you to be directly involved at all times. Your agent can work automatically when you configure its quantity and value fields. Your agent communicates with the seller’s agent on a Merkato platform called the Garage. (The Garage is Merkato’s name for auction services it runs from a server.)

Once you configure your agent, you can change valuations from your PC using a Java-based application, or communicate remotely with your agent as it bids from the Garage.

Running the agent on your PC desktop and operating a remote agent each has advantages. On your PC, the Merkato desktop The Merkato desktop is the first window that appears when the user begins to bring the Merkato buyer or seller agent to their desktop. It lets users specify which Merkato agent or agents they want to download to the desktop. display gives you real-time information about the auction and its participants. If you are not interacting with the agent, you can configure it and upload it to the garage. It will continue to run, and you avoid the chance of halting the auction if your PC crashes or you have network connectivity problems.