Puncturing of CRC Codes for IEEE 802.11ah

In some cases, like the proposed IEEE 802.11ah draft specification, there arises a need to have a short Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) code to detect errors on the information bits in the various signal fields. While an optimum CRC of the required length can be chosen for this, in order to minimize complexity it may be desirable to "puncture" an existing CRC generator to reduce the number of parity bits transmitted. In this paper we evaluate puncturing of a CRC-8 generator to generate a 4-bit CRC such that the minimum Hamming distance of the resultant code is 2.