AIDA: Responsive and Available Auctions Over the Internet

This paper discuss the design and implementation of an Architecture for Internet-based Distributed Auctions (AIDA). The AIDA system implements responsive and available auction services in a large scale distributed context, such as the Internet, by means of geographically distributed servers. AIDA can support fast auctions, whose duration could be as short as few tents of seconds. Moreover, AIDA does not suffer some drawbacks of the current online auctions, such as the "last minute bidding". Therefore, AIDA enables types of auction that are rarely implemented online; conversely, these are very common in traditional auctions. Further characteristics of AIDA are fault tolerance and scalability. The system can tolerate any predefined number of faults, both of servers and of network. The number of servers and the communication bandwidth increase linearly with respect to the number of clients.