NetBazaar: Networked Electronic Markets for Trading Computation and Information Services

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of NetBazaar, which is a distributed, federated electronic trading system (Marketplace) for buying and selling network resources and services and information products and services distributed across the Internet. The trading system provides mechanisms for suppliers to advertise information about their services and attribute-value pairs, and for consumers to query for information about service offerings by the suppliers. In addition, the trading system offers services to perform the trades on behalf of the consumers or it offers the consumers with a list of suppliers to contact. In order to recover costs and profit, the trading system charges a small fee to the suppliers and consumers for every trade that occurs. The charges could vary depending on the complexity of the trade, such as the overheads of payment, transaction and contract enforcement. NetBazaar has been designed to support a variety of business models, pricing and market mechanisms, searching and matching algorithms, fast negotiation mechanisms for a high volume of trades, and distributed access for consumers and suppliers to the trading system. An initial version of NetBazaar has been implemented using CORBA and Java components.