Rate-compatible punctured systematic repeat-accumulate codes

In this paper, we present rate-compatible systematic Repeat-Accumulate (RA) codes for the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. The systematic form is used because of the higher degree parity checks we require in the code. We show that very high code rates can be attained with good performance through our puncturing schemes. Although RA codes are very simple in terms of complexity compared to other codes such as turbo codes or Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, the performance of these codes is quite competitive. Codes with rates up to 9/10 are obtained from a single rate 113 systematic regular RA code. Performance results show that our puncturing provides superior performance at high code rates compared to just puncturing parity bits.