Performance analysis of exponential backoff

New analytical results are given for the performance of the exponential backoff (EB) algorithm. Most available studies on EB focus on the stability of the algorithm and little attention has been paid to the performance analysis of EB. In this paper, we analyze EB and obtain saturation throughput and medium access delay of a packet for a given number of nodes N. The analysis considers the general case of EB with backoff factor r; binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm is the special case with r=2. We also derive the analytical performance of EB with maximum retry limit M (EB-M), a practical version of EB. The accuracy of the analysis is checked against simulation results.