Performance of unequally punctured convolutional codes

In practical applications, some coded symbols are unequally punctured for rate matching of terminated convolutional codes. In this letter, performance upper bounds are proposed for a terminated convolutional code punctured with an arbitrary pattern. To obtain the upper bounds, a weight enumerator is defined to represent the relation between the Hamming weight of the coded outputs and that of the selected input information bits. A method is presented to compute the weight enumerator based on a modified trellis diagram. Simulation and numerical analysis show that the proposed bounds are tight to the performance of terminated convolutional codes.