Express Agent

The Express interface is an HTML version of the Desktop interface, with some significant differences:

It leaves 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. in the Merkato 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. (on the Merkato server) and controls it remotely. Closing the browser window does not affect your agent in the garage.

Your screen is not updated in real time. You must click Refresh to update information in status displays.
Reservations and certain spot market The Merkato mechanism by which bandwidth is traded, in a progressive second price auction. An optimal fair 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. is established and bandwidth is allocated to buyers, based on their bids relative to other buyers. settings are not supported in this interface (significant for Buyer agents, but not for Seller agents).

The Express interface is meant to support advanced users who know what the fields mean and want a quick way to check agent status or make configuration changes.

The Express agent is in the initial Portal The unique market mechanism by which Merkato allocates bandwidth to potential buyers at an optimal market price. 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. browser window when you open it. If your agent was active and bidding from the garage, when you open the Merkato Portal, you see a window like the one below:

The two buttons at the bottom of the window control your communication with 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 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.

Refresh – Updates the read-only status fields in the windows without sending configuration changes to the Resource agent.

· Apply – Updates the read-only status fields in the windows and sends configuration changes to the Resource agent.

The fields in this display are as follows (identified by their row titles):

Status – Controls whether the agent is bidding or not. You must click Apply for this change to take effect.
Resource – Selection list for the resource for which you are bidding. After you select a resource from this list you must click Apply for this selection to take effect.
Strategy – Dynamic Seller Strategy is the only strategy supported by the Express interface. You can select Static strategy but there are no bid entry fields. Creation and cancellation of reservations are not currently supported (although you may view confirmed reservations in 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. list below the Express interface in the Portal).

Current 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.– Displays the valuation currently in use. (This field in not editable.)
Valuation View – Seller Valuation is the only valuation supported for Seller agents.
Valuation Parameters – This set of fields contains the settings for the Seller valuation. You must click Apply after you make changes for them to take effect. A horizontal bar appears in the Min Value field, indicating that the field is not used.
Bid – A read-only display indicating the latest bid submitted. You must click Refresh to update this display. If this display is missing your agent is inactive and not bidding.
Allocation – A read-only display indicating the allocation received in the last round. You must click Refresh to update this display. If this display is missing, either your agent is inactive or it did not receive an allocation in the previous auction round.
Units – The selections made in this window change the units displayed for all other windows. All values are scaled to reflect the change in units. You need not click Apply for this change to take effect.

When your agent is inactive and there is no auction in progress, the Bid row is missing, as shown below.

Recent Allocation Table

For sellers, this table indicates reservations and allocations made to buyers of the 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. you have offered. Confirmed reservations are at the top, followed by the most recent Spot market allocations. Each Spot market allocation entry contains a summary of information for an hour, which generally includes many auction rounds.

Allocations are shown in order; most recent at the top. The columns are as follows:

Start Time	The start date and time for this allocation
End Time	The end date and time for this allocation
Resource	The name of the bandwidth product allocated
Buyer	The Buyer agent that won the allocation
Seller	The Seller agent that sold the allocation
Quantity ( Mbps One of the ways of expressing units of bandwidth-Megabits-per-second (1,000,000 bits-per-second). )	The bandwidth quantity for this allocation (for Spot market allocations, the average quantity obtained over the time period indicated)
Price ($/month/Mbps)	The unit price for this allocation (for Spot market allocations, the average price obtained over the time period indicated)
Cost ($)	The bottom-line cost for this allocation (for Spot market allocations, the average cost over the time period indicated)

The Allocation table gives you an indication that Merkato auctions have been providing the desired results. You may obtain information for longer timeframes in the Charge Reports page, via custom queries.