"The design trade-offs of transceiver hardware are crucial to the performance of wireless systems. The effect of such trade-offs on individual analog and digital components are vigorously studied, but their systemic impacts beyond component-level remain largely unexplored. In this dissertation, we present an in-depth study to characterize the surprisingly notable systemic impacts of low-pass filter design, which is a small yet indispensable component used for shaping spectrum and rejecting interference. Using a bottom-up approach, we examine how signal-level distortions caused by the trade-offs of low-pass filter design propagate to the upper-layers of wireless communication, reshaping bit error patterns and degrading link performance of today's 802.11 systems. Moreover, we propose a novel unequal error protection algorithm that harnesses low-pass filter defects for improving wireless LAN throughput, particularly to be used in forward error correction, channel coding, and applications such as video streaming. Lastly, we conduct experiments to evaluate the unequal error protection algorithm in video streaming, and we present substantial enhancements of video quality in mobile environments."--Page ii.
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