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)