In the 802.11b networks, the guarantee of an equal long-run channel access probability causes performance anomaly in a multi-rate wireless cell. Much interest has been involved in this issue and many effective mechanisms have been proposed. The usual MAC layer solutions include the initial contention window adaptation, the maximum transfer unit size adaptation and the packet bursting. In this paper, we propose a novel approach which introduces a new parameter called the transmission prob- ability pt to the legacy protocol. By adjusting pt according to the transmission rate, the proposed scheme can solve the performance anomaly problem cleanly. Throughput analysis and performance evaluation show that our scheme achieves significant im- provement in the aggregate throughput and the fairness.