An economic model for resource management in a Grid-based content distribution network

This paper presents an architecture to federate Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) in order to share computational resources, thus building an infrastructure that we call a Content Distribution Grid (CDG). The purpose of a CDG is to use a community policy allowing each CDN to put together a portion of its own resources to meet each other's requirements, and therefore to guarantee a stronger quality of service to users. Since CDNs of a CDG belong to different organisations, the interaction scenario can be considered competitive, that is, organizations are mainly self-interested and are aiming at maximizing the performances of its own system. For this reason, the resource sharing policy proposed here is based on a offer/demand competitive model, in which resources are purchased by paying for them a certain amount of (virtual or real) money. An economic model is thus derived to guide such a sale; here the CDN requesting resources (buyer) and the CDN offering resources (seller) agree on the quantity and the price by means of a utility-based negotiation approach. A multi-agent system is then proposed to realise the software architecture supporting this model of CDG. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.