Singletons for Simpletons Revisiting Windowed Backoff with Chernoff Bounds

This study explores the use standard Chernoff bounds and illustrates simplicity of this approach by re-analyzing some well-known backoff algorithms. Backoff algorithms are used in many distributed systems where multiple devices contend for a shared resource. For the classic balls-into-bins problem, the number of singletons—those bins with a single ball—is important to the analysis of several backoff algorithms; however, existing analyses employ advanced probabilistic tools. (Published Abstract Provided)