One of the main issues in distributed systems is supporting transparency which classifies distributed systems and network systems. The efforts for supporting transparency in many systems produced useful and important results such as the remote procedure call for location and access problems, and the name service for naming problems.
Currently, the realization of the extended transparency is necessary for better usability and reliability to the users, as well as the performance improvement. Replication is a common method used for improving availability, reliability, fault-tolerance and the performance in distributed systems.
The extended transparency can be supported by object replication. By replicating objects and grouping them by different configuration constraints, most of the transparency can be supported. Users specify the transparency needed, and the configuration management system dynamically constructs groups according to the user demands, application intrinsic properties, and the constraints on the system resources and the load of the system. The operations of groups are managed by the group management system. Different transparencies can be provided by defining different role of the group members. In this paper, the transparency mechanisms are implemented clearly and effectively using the Group Interactions System by using the well-defined functionalities for replicating group members.
