Broadband wireless access systems offer a solution for broadband access and QoS-aware multimedia services through a wireless medium. The IEEE 802.16 standards specify the physical and medium access control layers for broadband wireless access systems as well as the various mechanisms to meet the quality of service (QoS) requirements of a wide variety of applications. Among the mechanisms defined by the standards, the bandwidth request and grant mechanisms play a central role on guaranteeing the QoS required by the subscriber stations. In this paper, we undertake the study of the bandwidth request mechanisms defined in the IEEE 802.16 standards. We then propose an approach for reducing the overhead required by the signalling mechanisms. Our simulation results show that our approach outperforms the mechanisms proposed in the IEEE 802.16 standards. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.