In this paper, a contention model for the IEEE 802.16e is first proposed to analyze the frame-based behavior of contention resolution in 802.16e network. Then a Waiting-time Dependent Increasing rate Adapted Backoff (WDIA) algorithm is proposed to improve the contention efficiency. We introduce the concept of reduced overlapping between back-off windows of contending stations and we adopt an adapted increasing rate of the back-off window. The simulation results show that the WDIA algorithm achieves better performance in terms of number of retransmissions, access delay and resource utilization.