During the past few years, we have been witnessing the massive deployment of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. Even though the widespread deployment of such wireless LANs, many studies are still underway aiming to design and develop simple yet effective QoS mechanisms for supporting time-constrained services over such platforms. In this paper, we first overview five different QoS mechanisms recently introduced in the literature as well as the upcoming IEEE 802.11e (EDCA) standard. We then carry out a comparative performance evaluation of all the QoS mechanisms having been reviewed. We focus our study on the effectiveness of the various QoS mechanisms for supporting time-constrained services. © 2005 IEEE.