The paper introduces a novel spreading code protocol, the adaptive group-receiver code protocol, offering flexibility and stability under varying traffic conditions. In the protocol, terminals are divided into groups co-ordinated by central stations and a group-based receiver spreading coding is used to manage the contention among users in the groups. The protocol can adaptively adjust the number of groups according to traffic load and throughput-delay requirements. The analytical results show that the protocol is particularly befitting for the applications in local wireless networks requiring high throughput and low access delay.