An adaptive MAC protocol is developed and analyzed that offers a "best case" scenario by allowing the MAC to control medium parameters thereby fully exploiting the channel of an ad hoc wireless LAN. This new, opportunistic medium access control protocol is called CATER (Code Adapts To Enhance Reliability) and is based on the proposed MAC standard for wireless local area networks (WLAN)-IEEE 802.11 [IEE96]. As currently proposed, 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 combat a corrupt medium. However, CATER allows communicating stations to reconfigure their transceivers to use a longer PN code after a prescribed number of failed retransmissions. This longer code increases the process gain of the receiver and reduces the error rate. After the two stations are reconfigured, the source station sends the frame in question. Immediately after that frame is acknowledged, the source station may send additional frames during the reconfigured period. Simulation and emulation are used to demonstrate and validate the adaptive protocol's capabilities. Results show that this new protocol offers substantial improvement in system throughput when the channel degrades to a point that reliable transmission of frames is not feasible in a standard IEEE 802.11 WLAN. Specifically, CATER continues to function, permitting up to 14 percent normalized aggregate throughput at times when IEEE 802.11 permits no frames to pass through the WLAN. In addition, throughput experiences only a small decrease due to protocol overhead during periods when stations experience a good channel with few bit errors. Moreover, CATER does not adversely affect the predominate transport layer protocol (i.e., TCP), and provides equitable service to all stations within the network. / Ph. D.

One of the most important components of any wireless network is the medium access control protocol. This research deals with wireless ATM (WATM) medium access control (MAC) protocol. Conventional studies concerning WATM have focused mainly on variations of the time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) method for the wireless aspect of WATM networks. However, there are many advantages that the direct-sequence code-division-multiple-access (DS-CDMA) air-interface method has, such as inherent robustness against multipath fading, better resilience against security infringement attempts, and greater overall capacity compared to the TDMA method as proven in the cellular telephone industry. The main reason behind the relatively broader support for the TDMA method is that the source bit rate is generally higher compared to the DS-CDMA method since the maximum data rate per mobile unit is limited by the processing gain of a traditional DS-CDMA method. In this research, the problem of limited data rate often associated with a DS-CDMA air-interface is alleviated by employing the recently conceived multi-coded DS-CDMA as the primary air-interface, which is known to achieve maximum data rate per mobile unit comparable to applications employing TDMA. The focus of this research is on overcoming periods of significant deterioration of the wireless channel by adaptively employing bit combining. A MAC protocol called Adaptive Parallel Multiple Sub-stream CDMA (APMS-CDMA) is proposed to alternate between normal and ¡°rake-in¡± mode to deal with the often hostile environment of a WATM network. Although the context in which this research effort was conducted was a wireless ATM network environment, the protocol and techniques developed here can be applied to other infrastructure wireless systems using multi-code CDMA as their air-interface. Further, independent of the air-interface technique employed, other wireless systems can benefit from the channel estimation and the traffic management techniques used in this research effort. / Ph. D.

Recent accomplishments in link-level and radio technologies have significantly improved the performance of wireless links. Wireless mobile ad hoc networks, however, typically only take limited advantage of these enhancements. In this research, the medium access control protocol and ad hoc routing protocol are extended to take advantage of radios offering multi-user interference cancellation and direct-sequence spread-spectrum functionality, by encouraging multiple simultaneous connections and adaptively changing communication parameters on a per-packet basis. Through its environment characterization techniques, the adaptive direct sequence spread spectrum MAC protocol for non-broadcast multiple access networks (ADIM-NB) improves several aspects of the wireless mobile ad hoc network performance, including throughput, delay, stability, and power consumption, through its use of spread-spectrum multiple access and four different adaptive algorithms. The four adaptive algorithms change processing gain, forward error correction coding rate, transmit power, and number of simultaneous connections. In addition, the ad hoc routing protocol is extended with the clustering algorithm for mobile ad hoc network (CAMEN). With ADIM-NB in mind, CAMEN discourages the use of broadcast messages, supplements ADIM-NB's functionality at the network level, and improves the network scalability by aggregating nodes into clusters. Both protocols are intended to lead to more powerful and flexible communication capabilities for wireless nodes. Simulation models have been developed and simulated to verify the performance improvements of both protocols at the network-level as well as provide a means to perform trade-off analysis. Results indicate that the network capacity is increased between 50% in a moderately loaded network to 100% in a heavily loaded network over a non-adaptive MAC protocol. The delay also improve significantly in most scenarios of interest. / Ph. D.