Resource Trading Agents for Adaptive Active Network Applications

Adaptive applications seem to be the only realistic answer to the increasing diversity and decentralisation in networks. In order to accommodate fluctuations in network conditions, adaptive applications need to obtain information about resource availability. Using mobile agent technology applied to active networks, new models for adaptive applications can be envisaged. In this article we review the state of the art in agent and active network techniques for adaptive applications, and describe our work on an agent model for trading resources inside an active network node. We apply the model to the case of an audio mixing application. Our simulation results indicate that the model allows the application to make efficient use of the available resources, and to share resources according to user preferences.