An adaptive wireless local area network protocol that improves throughput via adaptive control of direct sequence spread spectrum parameters

We develop and analyze an elegant, opportunistic medium access control (MAC) protocol based on the proposed MAC standard for wireless local area networks (WLAN)---IEEE 802.11. Our adaptation of 802.11 is called CATER (Code Adapts To Enhance Reliability) and allows communicating stations to reconfigure their transceivers to use a longer pseudo-noise (PN) code when retransmissions are unsuccessful over a degraded channel. Results show that our protocol continues to function, permitting up to 14 percent normalized aggregate throughput, at times when IEEE 802.11 fails. In addition, throughput experiences only a small decrease due to protocol overhead during periods when stations experience a good channel with few bit errors.