Each 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. window has a Traffic-based tab.
If you activate Traffic-based bidding, 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. changes its maximum quantity according to changes in rates of usage at user-set intervals. Traffic-based bidding automatically aligns your bidding with your utilization.
Time Window¾The Measurement Window. Your agent continuously measures the amount of traffic you generate in five-minute increments. The Time window setting tells the agent, in minutes, how far back in time to look for the peak. The smallest interval you can select is 6 minutes. Unless your Merkato administrator has changed this, the largest allowed interval is 200 minutes (in other words, the peak of the last 40 5-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 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. your agent attempts to obtain above that of the recent measured peak. There are many reasons why you might want to obtain more bandwidth than your recent measured peak. The most significant reason is that you will not be able to measure peak traffic above your most recently measured peak if your 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. 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. Set your Quantity Margin to the maximum expected jump of traffic within a five-minute period.
Max Qty Requested¾Maximum Quantity Requested (Display Only field). The Merkato agent adds the measured traffic to the Quantity Margin to create this number. This is the value that is carried forward into the main valuation calculation. It is called the “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 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 may use your pre-determined valuation curve below that value (unless you are using a linear valuation) to attempt to obtain as much bandwidth as possible.
Active check box¾Checking this box enables Traffic-based bidding on your agent.
Apply¾Clicking Apply makes the numbers entered in the fields of the Traffic-based window active.
Example
In the illustration, the traffic window is set to 30 minutes. The agent bids for the quantity of bandwidth used during peak traffic during the previous 30 minutes. Every five minutes the agent examines the traffic during the previous 30 minute window.
