Simulation of a network capacity market and three middle-man strategies to price and sell dynamically routed point-to-point connections

Abstract

In a simulation of a computer network, the capacity between pairs of border routers in a network domain is sold on a spot market. End-users establish point-to-point connections across several domains by buying capacity in the domains along a path in the network. This paper compares three different trading strategies: spot requests, null broker requests, and derivative broker requests. Their performance is measured in terms of the ratio of successful connections, and the cost to establish a connection. Simulations of a network results show that the derivative broker requests typically performs better than the other two, especially in networks where prices fluctuate rapidly.