IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) employs the distributed coordination function (DCF) as the fundamental medium access function. DCF operates with binary exponential backoff (BEB) in order to avoid frame collisions. However it may waste wireless resources because collisions occur when multiple stations are contending for frame transmissions. In order to solve this problem, a binary negative-exponential backoff (BNEB) algorithm has been proposed that uses the maximum contention window size whenever a collision occurs. However, when the number of contending stations is small, the performance of BNEB is degraded due to the unnecessarily long backoff time. In this paper, we propose the adaptive BNEB (A-BNEB) algorithm to maximize the throughput regardless of the number of contending stations. A-BNEB estimates the number of contending stations and uses this value to adjust the maximum contention window size. Simulation results show that A-BNEB significantly improves the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF and can maintain a high throughput irrespective of the number of contending stations.