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Includes bibliographical references (p. 305) and index

Research to improve the performance of the IEEE 802.11 has been ongoing since 1990. The focus of this research has investigated the use of the MAC and Physical layers for improving throughput. An adaptive MAC protocol, CATER (Code Adapts To Enhance Reliability) is based on the proposed MAC standard for wireless local area networks (WLAN)-802. 11. IEEE 802.11 uses a fixed Pseudo-Noise (PN) code for spreading the information signal, implying a fixed process gain at the receiver. When the channel degrades, IEEE 802.11 offers only retransmissions at the MAC layer to contend with the corrupted medium. However, CATER allows communicating stations to reconfigure their transceivers to use a longer PN code after a prescribed number of failed retransmissions. The longer PN code increases the process gain of the receiver and reduces the error rate. This thesis analyzes the performance of CATER as changing the factor: Start (the number of transmission before the channel is reconfigured) and Max (additional frame transmissions during reconfigure), PN code length, the number of station, and implementing Forward Error Correction (FEC). CATER provides better throughput for smaller Start and larger Max at a high bit error rate (10-3). When CATER uses a PN code length of 63, the throughput is increased by 101 percent at high bit error rate (BER). However, 802.11 is better than CATER at low BER (< 10-3). As the number of stations is increased, the throughput is decreased, resulting from more stations contending for the channel to transmit the frames. When FEC is implemented with CATER, the throughput is improved by 156 percent at high BER (> 10-3).