The IEEE 802.11e draft standard is a proposal defining the mechanisms for wireless LANs aiming to provide QoS support to time-sensitive applications. However, recent studies have shown that the IEEE 802.11e (EDCA) performs poorly when the medium is highly loaded due to the high collision rate. Even though several proposals have been proposed to address this problem, they require important changes to the current standard specifications making difficult their actual implementation. In this paper, we propose a simple QoS-aware mechanism and fully compatible with the various operation modes of the EDCA standard as well as the legacy IEEE 802.11 (DCF) scheme. Our design has been based on an in-depth analysis of the several operation modes of both standards. This should ensure full compatibility of operation: an important feature since the transition from the IEEE 802.11 to the IEEE 802.11e will take some time making more likely the existence of hybrid scenarios where both standards will have to coexist. Our simulation results show that our new scheme outperforms the EDCA and other QoS-aware schemes recently reported in the literature. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.