A Novel Technique To Evaluate the Transfer Function of Punctured Turbo Codes

A novel approach for the calculation of the transfer function of a terminated punctured convolutional code, which can be seen as a convolutional block code, is presented in this paper. The transfer function of the convolutional block code can be then used to evaluate the transfer function of a punctured turbo code and derive a tight upper bound on the bit error probability. Furthermore, the approach is used to find puncturing patterns that generate punctured turbo codes with optimal performance.