Mobile-C Based Agent System for Detecting Improper Computer Usage at Computer Laboratories

Mobile agent based computing is one of the powerful technologies for the development of distributed complex systems. There is little research regarding the effectiveness of mobile agent based detecting of improper computer usage at computer laboratories. This paper presents a Mobile-C Based Agent System (MCBAS) for Detecting Improper Computer Usage at Computer Laboratories. Based on the Mobile-C library, the MABAS supports the dynamic sending and executing of control command, dynamic data exchange, and dynamic deployment of mobile code in C/C++, and thus can detect improper computer usage conveniently and efficiently. The experiment was conducted at number of computer laboratories in a university computer center to detect improper usage of the computer workstations, such as playing computer games. The experiment shows that the mobile agent based monitoring system is an effective method for detecting and interacting with students playing computer games at public computer laboratories.