Puncturing Strategies for Incremental Redundancy Schemes Using Rate Compatible Systematic Serially Concatenated Codes

A rate compatible puncturing strategy intended for incremental redundancy retransmission schemes is derived. In particular, systematic serially concatenated codes with two or more component codes are considered, although the method is applicable to any type of concatenated code. Extrinsic information transfer charts are used to select a puncturing strategy such that the signal-to-noise ratio required to reach a target bit error rate is minimized.