Many devices commonly found in wireless home networks such as smartphones, gaming consoles and media servers generate real-time traffic with stringent performance require- ments. Since the wireless medium is mostly accessed in a distributed manner (DCF), sen- sitive traffic needs to be "protected". This work investigates how mechanisms defined in the WiFi standard such as virtual carrier sensing and CTS frames can enable this with- out requiring any modifications to end devices. ns-3 simulations of this scheme in typical wireless home network configurations show significant performance improvement in the delivery rate of prioritized nodes compared to those using plain DCF.