In this paper, we study the collision resolution protocol of the IEEE 802.16 standard for metropolitan broadband wireless access systems. The standard specifies the use of a random access scheme based on the slotted binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm during the bandwidth request phase. We follow a team problem approach towards the analysis of the throughput and the delay during the bandwidth reservation process. A Markov chain analysis is used to obtain the optimal retransmission probabilities, the optimal value of the initial back off window size, Wmin, maximizing the throughput and the expected delays experienced by a subscriber station (SS) when placing its bandwidth requests. © 2010 IEEE.