SCALABLE ARCHITECTURES FOR RESPONSIVE AUCTIONS

In this Paper we discuss and compare the design and implementation of two distributed archi- tectures we have developed in order to support “responsive” (i.e., timely and available) auction services in a large scale distributed context. Specifically, our architectures can support distributed auction services whose timing requirements fall within the range of a few seconds. In addition, those architectures can adapt timely to possible variations of the network conditions (e.g., con- gestion, load). In order to provide the users with highly available auction services, our architectures allow one to implement those services by means of replicated auction servers. Hence, we believe that the Grid technology can provide us with an ideal infrastructure for their implementation.