On-Line Markets for Distributed Object Services: The MAJIC System

We describe a general-purpose architecture for applying economic mechanisms for resource allocation in distributed systems. Such economic mechanisms are required in settings such as the Internet, where resources belong to different owners. Our architecture is built above standard distributed-object frameworks, and provides a ``market'' for arbitrary distributed object resources. We first describe the abstract elements and properties of an architecture that can be applied over essentially any distributed object-based platform. We then describe the MAJIC system that we have implemented over Suns' Jini platform. A key novel aspect of our system is that it handles multiple parameters in the allocation and in the specification of utilities and costs for each distributed service. We provide both theoretical and experimental results showing the following three key properties of this system: (1) Efficient resource allocation. (2) Motivation for resource owners to share them with others. (3) Load balancing.