Internet Economics of Distributed Systems*

Abstract

A macroscopic view of  Internet -based distributed computer systems reveals the complexity of the organization and management of the resources and services they provide. The

complexity arises from the system size (e.g. number of systems, number of users) and

heterogeneity in applications (e.g. online transaction processing, e-commerce,

multimedia, decision support, intelligent information search) and resources (CPU, memory, I/O bandwidth, network bandwidth and buffers, etc.)

In a large distributed system , the set of systems, users and applications is

continuously changing. In this paper we address some of the management  issues of

providing Quality of Service (QoS), pricing, and efficient allocation of resources (computational resources) in networks and systems facilitated through economic mechanism design.

 Keywords: Internet Economics, Network Economy, Distributed Systems, Mechanism Design, Performance Management