Some results on partially systematic turbo codes

Partially-systematic turbo-codes (PSTC) are a recently introduced variation of turbo-codes. In a classical or fully-systematic turbo-code (FSTC), only the parity bits are punctured, but in a PSTC, both information and parity bits are punctured. In this paper, we examine in detail a PSTC with half the information bits punctured and compare this to a FSTC. This examination considers various puncturing matrices and block lengths, performance over a number of iterations, and performance over AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. Based on this examination, we have determined puncturing matrices that can give better BER performance than those previously employed, giving a coding gain of about 0.5 dB for BER=10^-5 over the FSTC.