IEEE 802.11 standard and the enhanced amendments have defined several transmission rates for mobile stations to transmit and receive data frames. With the characteristic of modulation schemes, a higher network throughput can be expected by using higher level modulation scheme, but frame error probability will also become higher. Doubtlessly, it is an open issue of selecting a proper modulation scheme for a pair of mobile stations in time-varying indoor environment. This paper proposes a safe multiple access-rates transmission (SMART) scheme to enhance the reliability of data transmission in IEEE 802.11 multi-rate infrastructure wireless networks. SMART scheme provides reliable transmission by reserving a retransmission period which immediately follows the transmitted frame and is estimated by a lower transmission rate according to the transmitted frame. The performance of SMART scheme is evaluated by analytical model and simulation experiment, which show that the proposed scheme is significantly better than the IEEE 802.11 standard under the real environment with asymmetric traffic load. An enhanced SMART (ESMART) scheme is also proposed especially to improve bandwidth waste for long packet length at access point (AP). The performance measurements, such as goodput, throughput, average access delay, and service rate, are obtained and compared for the different schemes.