Performance enhancement of partially systematic rate-compatible SCCCs through puncturing design

Partially systematic rate-compatible serial concatenated convolutional codes (SCCCs) are considered. These are generated from a classical rate 1/3 serial concatenated mother code. To obtain rate-compatible SCCCs, the puncturing is limited to inner coded bits, by puncturing both the inner code\´s parity and systematic bits. It is shown that the performance can be enhanced in the "waterfall" or in the "error-floor" region, by simply spreading the puncturing over the parity and the systematic bits without increasing encoding and decoding complexity.