Rate allocation for serial concatenated block codes

While serial concatenated codes were designed to provide good overall performance with reasonable system complexity, they may arise naturally in certain cases, such as the interface between two networks. In this work we consider the problem of constrained rate allocation between nonsystematic block codes in a serial concatenated coding system with either ideal or no interleaving between the codes. Given constraints on system parameters, such as a limit on the overall rate, analytic guidelines for the selection of good inner code rates are found by using an upper bound on the average system block error rate.