Fast Flexible Paxos: Relaxing Quorum Intersection for Fast Paxos

Paxos, the de facto standard approach to solving distributed consensus, operates in two phases, each of which requires an intersecting quorum of nodes. Multi-Paxos reduces this to one phase by electing a leader but this leader is also a performance bottleneck. Fast Paxos bypasses the leader but has stronger quorum intersection requirements. In this paper we observe that Fast Paxos' intersection requirements can be safely relaxed, reducing to just one additional intersection requirement between phase-1 quorums and any pair of fast round phase-2 quorums. We thus find that the quorums used with Fast Paxos are larger than necessary, allowing alternative quorum systems to obtain new tradeoffs between performance and fault-tolerance.
To be published in the Proceedings of International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking 2021 (ICDCN '21)