Although a substantial amount of studies have been carried out in order to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11, most of them focused on how to slowly decrease the Contention Window size, instead of resetting it to its initial value. Slow decreasing of the window size reduces the collision probability and increases the channel throughput. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve good results in a heterogeneous network which coexists with the original DCF. For instance, a Gentle DCF(GDCF) has good performance in a homogeneous environment, while it can hardly transmit frames in a heterogeneous environment including the original DCF. It is because the slow decreasing of the window size reduces the transmission probability. In this paper, we propose a Fast Recovery DCF(FRDCF) to solve this problem. In the FRDCF, the reset mechanism of the original DCF is maintained to keep the transmission probability high, while a new counter is used to enhance the performance of the wireless LAN. We prove that, compared with the GDCF, the FRDCF has better performance in a heterogeneous wireless LAN.