A Study of Building Internet Marketplaces on the Basis of Mobile Agents for Parallel Processing

In this paper, we propose a framework of Internet marketplaces on the basis of mobile agents. It not only simulates real commercial activities by consumers, agents and merchants, but also provides an environment for parallel processing. The latter is particularly important as more shops (sites) can be searched in real time to provide consumers with better choices. Meanwhile, if the number of mobile agents is very large and the dispatch is processed in a serial way, it can become a bottleneck that impacts the efficiency as a whole. In this paper, we also present and discuss several hierarchical dispatch models where the dispatch of multiple mobile agents can be processed in parallel over different hosts. We study these models analytically and empirically. The conducted experiments show that, in comparison with several serial mobile agent models, parallel mobile agent models can improve the performance significantly. In addition, in the best case for the parallel dispatch model, the time complexity for dispatching n mobile agents is O(log₂ n).