In order for an open mobile-agent system to achieve success, there must be incentive for host sites to provide fair and reasonable access. This implies that hosts should be compensated for the additional load and security risks supporting a mobile-agent system incurs.
We investigate the possibility of endowing mobile agents with a limited amount of currency with which to purchase computing services from hosts and other resource owners. Resource owners could then distribute the proceeds to their local users to launch new mobile agents.
The currency used by agents to buy services may or may not be linked to other useful currencies (e.g. U.S. Dollars). If the agents' currency is exchangeable for others, computation then becomes a far more liquid commodity. Administrative domains may temporarily expand their computing resources by buying computing resources from other domains.
Tieing computation to a useful currency eliminates denial of service attacks. A malicious agent can wantonly consume at its own peril; the host sets a price for consumption that provides fair compensation. Hosts are free to raise or lower prices to deter or attract customer agents. In this manner, network load is both temporally and spatially balanced.
Market systems implicitly distribute the responsibility of resource allocation among the participants. This is desirable given that one of the motives for using mobile-agent systems is to distribute computation throughout the environment.
The grand vision of the research is to create a safe open mobile-agent system where it is to a resource owner's advantage to allow controlled access to outside uses. Programs could travel the world looking for their data, compute at locations to minimize the impact on their environments, and possibly sell their services to sites or other agents.