collision detection

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

CSMA/CD protocol used on Ethernet specifies that they

should then wait for a random time before re-transmitting.

See also backoff.

This contrasts with slotted protocols and token passing.

(1997-03-18)