The IEEE 802.16 standard defines a contention bandwidth request mechanism offering QoS-aware broadband access through a wireless medium. According to the standard, the Base Station (BS) is responsible for granting the requests issued by the Subscriber Stations (SSs). The SSs communicate their requests to the BS by placing their requests into the uplink subframe, using the contention period defined within the subframe for this purpose. The size of contention period, defined in minislots, is fixed by the BS on a frame by frame basis. The remaining part of the uplink subframe is used to carry the data frames. A tradeoff between these two periods of the uplink subframe is required for an effective operation of the system. On the contrary, if the size of the contention is shorten below a certain threshold, the SSs may be unable to place their requests within the time required by the end-user applications. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive mechanism of the contention period size. The proposed mechanism takes into account the varying operation conditions of the system by estimating the number of stations that may be placing a request. Simulation results confirm that our proposal outperforms other mechanisms having recently been reported in the literature. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.