High-rate punctured convolutional codes for Viterbi and sequential decoding

An investigation is conducted of the high-rate punctured convolutional codes suitable for Viterbi and sequential decoding. Results on known short-memory codes M⩽8 discovered by others are extended. Weight spectra and upper bounds on the bit error probability of the best known punctured codes having memory 2⩽M ⩽8, and coding rates 2/3⩽R⩽7/8 are provided. Newly discovered rate-2/3 and -3/4 long-memory punctured convolutional codes with 9⩽M⩽23 are provided together with the leading terms of their weight spectra and their bit error performance bounds. Some results of simulation with sequential decoding are given