Exponential Backoff: Meta-Stability and Implicit Admission Control
Abstract
We analyze exponential backoff, an algorithm used to share a single communication channel in a distributed manner between several users, in a similar way as many networking standards such as 802.11. We demonstrate that this algorithm has a meta-stable behavior, in the sense that the system oscillates over long time-scales between meta-stable configurations where only a subset of the sources effectively access the channel. In other words, meta-stability creates a form of implicit admission control. We provide both theoretical tools and numerical experiments to understand this phenomenon further. Our experiments are fully reproducible and the code is publicly available as a Python package available at https://pypi.org/project/slotted-aloha-simulator/.
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BibTeX
@misc{combes2026exponential,
title = {{Exponential Backoff: Meta-Stability and Implicit Admission Control}},
author = {Richard Combes and Fabien Mathieu and Thomas Bonald},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.37073},
eprint = {2609.37073},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37073},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Exponential Backoff: Meta-Stability and Implicit Admission Control
AU - Richard Combes
AU - Fabien Mathieu
AU - Thomas Bonald
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.37073
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37073
AB - We analyze exponential backoff, an algorithm used to share a single communication channel in a distributed manner between several users, in a similar way as many networking standards such as 802.11. We demonstrate that this algorithm has a meta-stable behavior, in the sense that the system oscillates over long time-scales between meta-stable configurations where only a subset of the sources effectively access the channel. In other words, meta-stability creates a form of implicit admission control. We provide both theoretical tools and numerical experiments to understand this phenomenon further. Our experiments are fully reproducible and the code is publicly available as a Python package available at https://pypi.org/project/slotted-aloha-simulator/.
ER -