Effects of an asynchronous resource allocation protocol on end-to-end service provision

In this paper we present a protocol for acquiring resource bundles from autonomously operating markets and discuss results of experiments that were performed to quantify the protocol performance at high loads. A major finding from from our experiments is that an application class may be penalized by experiencing delays in accessing a shared resource as a result of overload on resources used by other application classes, which are unknown to this class. In turn, these delays may cause under-utilization of other resources used by this application class. Moreover, we illustrate how such effects can emerge by varying the relative occurrence frequencies application classes, but without changing aggregate load of the system.