This paper analyzes the fairness and efficiency of channel sharing when heterogeneous wireless networks that have different transmission power and/or coverage coexist with the contention-based channel access protocol. First, we show that the existing CSMA (carrier sensing multiple access) protocol, that is a prevailing contention-based mechanism, results in significant unfairness of channel access because of (1) the asymmetric capability of carrier sensing and (2) the blindness of binary exponential backoff and link adaptation mechanisms to the interference-driven transmission failures. Next, we derive the feasible region of carrier sensing thresholds that assures spatial reuse and fair channel sharing simultaneously. Moreover, we establish an analytical model for per-system throughput and investigate the effect of contention window size and transmission rate on the fairness and efficiency of channel sharing. Finally, we compare the performance of several approaches for fair channel sharing via simulations under various network configurations.