Utility Driven Mobile-Agent Scheduling

Mobile agents are programs capable of migrating from one host machine to another. We propose that mobile agents purchase resource access rights from host machines thereby establishing a market for computational resources and giving agents a metric to evenly distribute themselves throughout the network. Market participation requires quantitative information about resource consumption to de ne demand and calculate utility. We create a formal utility model to derive user-demand functions, allowing agents to e ciently plan expenditure and deal with price uctuations. By quantifying demand and utility, resource owners can precisely set a value for a good. We simulate our model in a mobile agent scheduling environment and show how mobile agents may use server prices to distribute themselves evenly throughout a network.