Patent attributes
Clients that fail to access a resource may compute backoff times for waiting before retrying to access the resource. The clients may reference a sequence of time windows where the time windows may have increasing numbers of time slots. The clients may select respective time slots in a first time window. If the clients again fail to access the resource, then the time slots selected by the clients may at least partly determine which time slots the clients select in a next (second) time window. The time slot selections in the second time window may be at least partly randomly selected. A client may randomly select a time slot in the second time window from among a proper subset of time slots in the second time window. The proper subset may be based on which time slot the client selected in the first time window.
