Node synchronization for punctured convolutional codes of rate (N-1)/N

The article discusses syndrome based node synchronization for high rate convolutional codes. The authors compare two approaches for syndrome based synchronization for punctured high rate codes. Performance results as well as implementation complexity estimates are presented. It is shown that the fact that the syndrome polynomials are not uniquely determined by the code polynomials can be used to optimize the performance of the node synchronizer. Good syndromes for the punctured standard code with constraint length seven are presented. Furthermore it is shown that a versatile syndrome based synchronizer can be implemented with a small area consumption in VLSI if one does not try to push the syndrome based approach to its limits. Thus the practicality of this high performance approach is demonstrated.