Abstract: Traditional servers offer little support to handle situations like faults due to the approach usually followed based on mirroring and/or duplicating functions. This approach lacks in transparency with respect to the client and causes a considerable waste of resources. Some requirements of a good service provider have been highlighted such as, for instance, reliability, capability to work in a heterogeneous environment, scalability and dynamical reconfigurability. A service provider has been developed in order to satisfy the above mentioned requirements; it is based mainly on the use of multicast addressing and the agent paradigm.
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