A new approach to the construction of high-rate convolutional codes

This letter presents a new technique to construct high-rate convolutional codes using a structure formed by a high-rate block code and a simpler convolutional code. The goal is to obtain good convolutional codes in terms of free distance and number of nearest neighbors, with better performance than punctured codes. The obtained codes improve over the best known high-rate punctured codes with the same rate and memory in terms of both bit error probability and computational decoding complexity.