Group Communication Specifications: A Comprehensive Study
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~idish/Abstracts/gcs-survey.html
  peer-reviewed

Chockler, Gregory V., Idit Keidar and Roman Vitenberg
MIT
2001

Abstract:

View-oriented group communication is an important and widely used building block for many distributed applications. Much current research has been dedicated to specifying the semantics and services of view-oriented Group Communication Systems (GCSs). However, the guarantees of different GCSs are formulated using varying terminologies and modeling techniques, and the specifications vary in their rigor. This makes it difficult to analyze and compare the different systems.