Abstract:
The widespread use of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and the desire for such products from different vendors to operate together has generated a movement towards standardization. Over the last decade, several organizations worldwide have researched and developed such standards, this includes the IEEE 802.11 committee. One of the important considerations in design and marketing WLAN products is the data rate supported by such products. This thesis deals with the development of a modification of the Direct Sequence (DS) physical layer standard in IEEE 802.11 to allow higher data rates beyond the 1-2Mb/s supported by the standard. More precisely, this thesis proposes using Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and turbo coding, an aggressive channel encoding technique, to improve the data rate performance 2-3 times over that in IEEE
802.11. A simplified transceiver design is presented and computer simulations are performed to verify the design and implementation considerations.
