Paxos With Priorities for Blockchain Applications

Abstract

Paxos is a well known protocol for state machine replication and consensus in face of crash faults. However, it suffers from inefficiencies in request handling, particularly in scenarios requiring preemptive prioritization. To address this, we propose a priority-aware extension similar to MultiPaxos and evaluate its performance using a queuing model, and show the improvement in performance metrics such as mean completion and waiting times. Our results demonstrate that integrating prioritization mechanisms into Paxos reduces latency for high-priority requests while ensuring fairness. The aging-based approach maintains correctness of the consensus process while adding flexibility to manage time-sensitive distributed applications such as permissioned blockchains.