High-rate punctured convolutional self-doubly orthogonal codes for iterative threshold decoding

The puncturing technique allows obtaining high-rate convolutional codes from low-rate convolutional codes used as mother codes. This technique has been successfully applied to generate good high-rate convolutional codes which are suitable for Viterbi and sequential decoding. In this paper, we investigate the puncturing technique for convolutional self-doubly orthogonal codes (CSO²C) which are decoded using an iterative threshold-decoding algorithm. Based on an analysis of iterative threshold decoding of the rate-R=b/(b+1) punctured systematic CSO²C, the required properties of the rate-R=1/2 systematic convolutional codes (SCCs) used as mother codes are derived. From this analysis, it is shown that there is no need for the punctured mother codes to respect all the required conditions, in order to maintain the double orthogonality at the second iteration step of the iterative threshold-decoding algorithm. The results of the search for the appropriate rate-R=1/2 SCCs used as mother codes to yield a large number of punctured codes of rates 2/3≤R≤6/7 are presented, and some of their error performances evaluated.