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 less than or equal to 8 discovered by others are extended. Weight spectra and upper bounds on the bit error probability of the best known punctured codes having memory M betweem 2 amd 8, and coding rates R between 2/3 ande 7/8 are provided. Newly discovered rate-2/3 and -3/4 long-memory punctured convolutional codes with M between 9 and 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.