NETWORK RESOURCE LEASING

Techniques for allowing network terminals to lease resources from one another. In an exemplary embodiment, an owner terminal determines the availability of resources (locally available or remotely accessible) to share with other terminals. The owner terminal establishes service and price level terms for sharing its resource, and advertises those terms to other terminals. A user terminal determines its own resource requirements, and searches a network for one or more owner terminals offering the desired resource. An owner terminal and a user terminal negotiate on the terms for use of an identified resource, and the owner terminal leases the resource to the user terminal. Applications include a virtual data center for leasing file storage space, network traffic bandwidth leasing to devices such as mobile phones, ad hoc distributed computing architectures, and third-party operating system (OS) support schemes.