Mobile agent based system for listing fundamental wi-fi peer-to-peer network details

Abstract

In our everyday operations there is need to engage agents to perform some duties on our behalf, hence they are gaining acceptance as a technology and are being used. Most of the networked offices, networked homes, cyber cafe’s, learning institutions and other arenas where computers are interconnected on a Wi-Fi network, have peer-to-peer networks. In Wi-Fi peer-to-peer networks, it is difficult to identify the network details of all the network devices connected such as the IP adresses, mac addresses and computer names of all computers connected on Wi-Fi peer-to-peer network at one go, hereby referred to to as fundamental network details. This is possible in a client-server based architecture where the server monitors all the computers on the network. From the above gap, we developed a mobile agent that could be run in any computer on the Wi-Fi peer-to-peer network and it lists these fundamental details of all the computers connected to the Wi-Fi peer-to-peer network. In developing this mobile agent, we used the MaSE agent methodology. The mobile agent was coded, implemented and tested and subjected to various controls which it overcame and managed to return desired fundamental details with 80% accuracy. The agent had the capacity to classify every computer on the network as either intruder or non-intruder based on the list of authorised computers supplied by the user. The agent suffered major limitation such as taking long to learn and return the results, not communicating to the intruders or shutting them down. In future, the agent could be improved to reduce processing time, communicate and shut down intruding computers or deny them network access.