Rate-compatible punctured low-density parity-check codes with short block lengths

We consider the problem of rate-compatible puncturing of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. In previous work, it was shown that "good" puncturing distributions exist for LDPC codes but the code length was large. In this correspondence, we give a procedure for determining the puncturing distributions for LDPC codes with short block lengths (a few thousand bits) and show that careful puncturing can produce good performance. We compare the performance of the rate-compatible punctured LDPC codes with dedicated LDPC codes across a range of rates and see that the rate-compatible codes have a favorable complexity/performance tradeoff.