History
The topic predates the protocol. In 1988, Lynch, Dwork and Stockmeyer had demonstrated the solvability of consensus in a broad family of "partially synchronous" systems. Paxos has strong similarities to a protocol used for agreement in viewstamped replication, first published by Oki and Liskov in 1988, in the context of distributed transactions. Notwithstanding this prior work, Paxos offered a particularly elegant formalism, and included one of the earliest proofs of safety for a fault-tolerant distributed consensus protocol.
Reconfigurable state machines have strong ties to prior work on reliable group multicast protocols that support dynamic group membership, for example Birman's virtually synchronous gbcast protocol. However, it should be noted that gbcast is unusual in supporting durability and addressing partitioning failures. Most reliable multicast protocols lack these properties, which are required for implementations of the state machine replication model. This point is elaborated in a paper by Lamport, Malkhi and Zhou.
Read more about this topic: Paxos (computer Science)
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