An improved stability bound for binary exponential backoff

Goodman, Greenberg, Madras and March gave a lower bound of n(-Omega (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(-Omega (log n)). We improve the lower bound, showing that the protocol is stable for arrival rates up to O(n(-(0.75+delta))), for any delta > 0.