Linearity of Client/Server Systems

An important property of a client/server system is the independence of the interaction between the server and a client from the interactions that the server might have with other possible clients. In this paper we try to give a deenition of such a property, that we called linearity, by means of the Process Algebra formalism. Through some examples of linear and non linear systems, we illustrate the expres-siveness of our deenition. Moreover, we present a suucient condition for linearity and discuss the preservation of linearity w.r.t. process-algebraic operators applied to linear systems.