Parallelism can be applied to local area networks to achieve higher data rates using existing hardware technologies. Parallelism can be employed at the different layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OS1) reference model. This research proposes and analyzes a technique that permits the use of different degrees of parallelism at different protocol layers. A new protocol layer, called the access layer is defined. The protocol and functionality for this layer are defined. The definitions make provision for incorporating an error correction coding procedure known as cross channel coding. A software simulator was built for the proposed parallel network. The simulator has a detailed model of the access layer and was used to verify the functionality defined for the access layer and to estimate the performance of the parallel network. The simulation results indicate that although the access layer processes data in serial, it is not a bottleneck in the parallel system. Other insights obtained from the experiments are also presented. / Master of Science