Scalability and robustness of a market-based network resource allocation system

In this paper, we consider issues related to scalability and robustness in designing a market-based multi-agent sys-tem that allocates bandwidth in a communications network. Specically, an empirical evaluation is carried out to assess the system performance under a variety of design congu-rations in order to provide an insight into network deploy-ment issues. This extends our previous work in which we developed an application that makes use of market-based software agents that compete in decentralised marketplaces to buy and sell bandwidth resources. Our new results show that given a light to moderate network trafc load, parti-tioning the network into a few regions, each with a separate market server, gives a higher call success rate than by us-ing a single market. Moreover, a trade-off in the number of regions was also noted between the average call success rate and the number of messages received per market server. Finally, given the possibility of market failures, we observe that the average call success rates increase with an increas-ing number of markets until a maximum is reached. 1