Market forces are the most effective mechanism to fairly and efficiently allocate resources among competing service requests. However, for distributed resources, the implementation of a coherent market mechanism can be complex and costly. In this paper, we present the design and prototype implementation of a distributed resource allocation system that allows to apply flow-based market mechanisms to a network domain. The system design guarantees a constant execution complexity and an extremely simple layout of internal nodes. All relevant intelligence is located in the edge systems. We explain how the system can be used to realize various types of market mechanisms and show the potential for efficient implementation by means of lab experiments using the system prototype. This work is based on earlier conceptual proposals and theoretical analysis. It is focused on the system design and implementation aspects, as well as on questions of detail, which are usually ignored by existing theory work.
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