Spot Market vs. Reservation Market

There are two ways to buy and sell bandwidth in a Merkato system:

• Buyers can request and receive a fixed amount of bandwidth, at a fixed price, for a fixed term
• Buyers can create a bidding strategy and contend for bandwidth with other buyers at frequent intervals

The first method is called the Reservation market and uses a reservation agent. The second method is called the Spot market and uses a spot agent.

There is no Reservation agent for sellers (although you may wish to have your Merkato administrator create a buy-back reservation agent for you, as a convenient way of adding bandwidth to the marketplace). All reservation settings are pre-configured in the Merkato server.