Ring Paxos: High-Throughput Atomic Broadcast

Abstract: Atomic broadcast is an important communication primitive often used to implement state-machine replication. Despite the large number of atomic broadcast algorithms proposed in the literature, few papers have discussed how to turn these algorithms into efficient executable protocols. This paper focuses on a class of atomic broadcast algorithms based on Paxos, with its corresponding desirable properties: safety under asynchrony assumptions, liveness under weak synchrony assumptions, and resiliency-optimality. The paper presents two protocols, M-Ring Paxos and U-Ring Paxos, derived from Paxos. The protocols inherit the properties of Paxos and can be implemented very efficiently. We report a detailed performance analysis of M-Ring Paxos and U-Ring Paxos and compare them to other atomic broadcast protocols.