Optimal rate-compatible irregular concatenated zigzag codes using puncturing and pruning

In this paper, we show that irregular concatenated zigzag (ICZZ) codes are suitable as mother codes to support a wide range of code rates. We introduce the degree distribution matching method to derive the optimal puncturing and pruning patterns in order to achieve the rate-compatible target code rates of ICZZ code. By combining ICZZ code with the optimal puncturing and pruning patterns, new rate-compatible ICZZ (RC-ICZZ) codes are constructed. In an example, n RC-ICZZ code to achieve the code rates 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, 4/5, and 8/9 is constructed and shown to outperform RCTC adopted in 3GPP. Therefore, RC-ICZZ codes are suitable for hybrid automatic repeat request to increase the system throughput.