Exponential Backoff

Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs developed the technique at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s while building Ethernet, adapting and improving on the collision-handling of ALOHAnet. Their July 1976 paper in Communications of the ACM formally named it "Binary Exponential Backoff," describing how each collision doubled the mean wait interval before a retry. The approach was later codified in the IEEE 802.3 standard and became a foundational pattern across distributed systems.