You want to look at the lease mechanism. With leasing, the client has to send periodic pings to the server, and if it fails to ping within the specified time frame, the server informs a registered listener that the client's connection has apparently failed. For more information, see Chapter 8. "Connection Exception Listeners and Leasing" of the Remoting Guide (http://labs.jboss.com/jbossremoting/docs/guide/index.html).