Periodic symbol puncturing of trellis codes

We present trellis codes designed to perform well in the context of periodic symbol puncturing. Progressive puncturing of these new trellis codes allows unequal error protection or continuous adaptation of the information rate to match channel and traffic conditions. Deep fades or strong interference also may be considered as a form of puncturing. For these environments, we present examples of trellis codes that are robust to all puncturing patterns that maintain non-negative effective redundancy. This robustness extends even to puncturing patterns that reduce the effective redundancy to zero.