High rate puncturing of LDPC codes

High-rate LDPC codes are increasingly used in transmission systems. Puncturing is a common scheme which produces a code with higher code rate starting from a base code with lower rate. This paper discusses a new method to derive a puncturing pattern, given the parity matrix of the base code. The method allows the extraction of a puncturing pattern which is optimized in terms of error floor performance and satisfies some constraints which results in a significant reduction of HW complexity with respect to other solutions. Simulation and HW measurements results on a punctured 19/20 code derived from a rate 15/16 LDPC code are reported.