Or the shape of the equation itself? There's quite a bit of research[1] in the area and it seems for most applications you can indeed get away with quadradic o

Or the shape of the equation itself? There's quite a bit of research[1] in the area and it seems for most applications you can indeed get away with quadradic or basically any superlinear backoff algorithm. However, most of the work I've seen was based either on synthetic models or tested only on smallish networks under artificial congestions. It's hard to predict how it will cope at internet-scale when theory meets broken vendor-implementations. [1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5766127 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5766...