Abstract

Abstract. We study the problem of contention resolution for differentsized jobs on a simple channel. When a job makes a run attempt, it learns only whether the attempt succeeded or failed. We first analyze binary exponential backoff, and show that it achieves a makespan of √ log n) with high probability, where V is the total work of all n con-V 2 Θ( tending jobs. This bound is significantly larger than when jobs are constant sized. A variant of exponential backoff, however, achieves makespan O(V log V) with high probability. Finally, we introduce a new protocol, size-hashed backoff, specifically designed for jobs of multiple sizes that achieves makespan O(V log 3 log V). The error probability of the first two bounds is polynomially small in n and the latter is polynomially small in log V. 1

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