obtained and the relevance to opportunistic scheduling was discussed. In [@qin-berry-osa], Qin and Berry study splitting with ternary feedback for opportunistic scheduling for i.i.d. wireless channel. We have briefly described the algorithm in Section \[sec:osa\]; we motivate our formulation of contention resolution as a source coding problem by studying the opportunistic splitting algorithm presented in [@qin-berry-osa]. Splitting algorithms have been studied for other network and channel scenarios as well. In [@kessler-sidi-splittingnoisy], Kessler and Sidi study splitting algorithms for noisy channel feedback. In [@qin-berry-osafairness], Qin and Berry report the performance of splitting for different notions of fairness. In [@yu-giannakis-sic], Yu and Giannakis study the performance of splitting with successive interference cancellation in a tree algorithm. In this work, we restrict to i.i.d. wireless channel under ideal channel assumptions; our aim is to present an alternate formulation for contention resolution using a source coding framework.

There are number of works concerning distributed opportunistic feedback schemes for wireless systems (see e.g., [@tang-etal-opportunisticfeedback]). In [@qin-berry-multiuser], Qin and Berry proposes a channel aware ALOHA and characterizes its performance. In [@patil-deveciana-reducingfeedback], Patil and de Veciana discuss about reducing feedback for opportunistic scheduling to support best effort and real time traffic. In this work, we consider a 