Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Wide local area networks (WLAN) are increasingly important in meeting the needs of next generation broadband wireless communications systems for both commercial and military applications. Under IEEE 802.11a 5GHz WLAN standard, OFDM was chosen as the modulation scheme for transmission because of its well-known ability to avoid multi-path effects while achieving high data rates. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the performance of the IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard receiver over flat fading Nakagami channels in a worst case, pulse-noise jamming environment, for the different combinations of modulation type (binary and non-binary modulation) and code rate specified by the WLAN standard. Receiver performance with Viterbi soft decision decoding (SDD) will be analyzed for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) alone and for AWGN plus pulse-noise jamming. Moreover, the performance of the IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard receiver will be examined both in the scenario where perfect side information is considered to be available (optimum receiver) and when it is not (sub-optimum receiver). In the sub-optimum receiver scenario, the receiver performance is examined both when noise-normalization is utilized and when it is not. The receiver performance is severely affected by the pulse-noise jamming environment, especially in the suboptimum receiver scenario. However, the sub-optimum receiver performance is significantly improved when noise-normalization is implemented. / Lieutenant, Hellenic Navy