Singletons for Simpletons: Revisiting Windowed Backoff using Chernoff Bounds

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 to obtain concentration bounds. Here, we show that standard Chernoff bounds can be used instead, and the simplicity of this approach is illustrated by re-analyzing some well-known backoff algorithms.