Design of Rate-Compatible Punctured Repeat-Accumulate Codes

In this paper, we design rate-compatible punctured repeat-accumulate (RA) codes for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The design involves optimizing the punctured profile of a mother code such that the resulting high rate codes give good performance. A three phase puncturing scheme is employed and the design employs EXIT charts. These codes are very simple in terms of complexity, and so are quite competitive to rate-compatible turbo or low density parity check (LDPC) codes. Codes with rates up to 10/11 are obtained from a single rate 1/3 regular RA code. Results show that these codes are good even at practical blocklengths such as 512 bits.