An improved puncturing method for rate-compatible LDPC codes

This paper presents an improvement of a puncturing technique for rate-compatible low density parity check (LDPC) codes originally proposed by Asvadi and Banihashemi. In the original technique, the puncturing bits are selected by progressively reducing the search space according to a certain sequence of criteria. The last criterion is based on the ACE (approximate cycle extrinsic message degree) values of the short cycles present in the Tanner graph of the code. In this paper, we propose to substitute the last criterion with one which is based on the absorbing sets of the code. Simulation results show that this scheme improves the performance compared to the original and some other scheme available in the literature.