Medium access contention and route failures in the saturated wireless ad hoc networks increase the average number of transmission attempts required to successfully deliver a frame. MAC contention and route failures also cause burst packet losses at the network layer, which results in the degradation of real-time application quality. In this thesis, the effect of MAC contention and route failures is analyzed on stationary and mobile saturated ad hoc networks for variation in the network size and data rates. In stationary networks, MAC contention has a dominating effect on burst losses. In mobile networks, route failure causes a similar effect. An increase in the data transmission rate affected the burst losses in both stationary and mobile networks