It was created around 2009 to replace the old ethX naming scheme that caused problems on multihomed machines because the network interface controllers (NICs) would be named based on the order in which they were found by the kernel as it booted.
[1] An Engineering Change Request was submitted to the PCI SIG firmware group on how system firmware can provide device naming to operating systems via the ACPI interface.
[2] The convention was implemented for Dell in a module called biosdevname.
[6][7] It was also released in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 2 in February 2012.
[8][9] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 started using systemd for networking.