An Improved Stability Bound for Binary Exponential Backoff

Abstract.

Goodman, Greenberg, Madras and March gave a lower bound of n ^{-Ω(log  n}) for the maximum arrival rate for which the n -user binary exponential backoff protocol is stable. Thus, they showed that the protocol is stable as long as the arrival rate is at most n ^{-Ω(log  n}) . We improve the lower bound, showing that the protocol is stable for arrival rates up to O(n ^-(0.75+δ) ) , for any δ>0 .