In the IEEE 802. 11 protocol, the adoption of the exponential backoff technique leads to throughput performance strongly dependent on the initial contention window size and, most importantly, on the number of contending stations considered in the network. This paper proposes a simpie but accurate method to dynamically estimate the number of contending stations in a wireless local area network (WLAN). Based on estimation, all the mobile stations dynamically adjust the initial contention window in medium access control (MAC) layer to avoid collisions. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve efficient channel utilization, higher system throughput, and better faess performance.