networking A class of methods for sharing a data
transmission medium in which hosts transmit as soon as they
have data to send and then check to see whether their
transmission has suffered a
collision with another host's.
If a collision is detected then the data must be resent. The
resending algorithm should try to minimise the chance that two
hosts's data will repeatedly collide. For example, the
should then wait for a random time before re-transmitting.
(1997-03-18)