Rate-Compatible Turbo Codes Designed with Puncture-Constrained DRP Interleavers

Rate-compatible turbo codes are designed using dithered relative prime (DRP) interleavers with data puncturing. DRP interleavers are simple to implement and memory-efficient. Their repetitive structure facilitates finding interleaver parameters that provide excellent performance at both high and low error rates. With puncture-constrained DRP interleavers, the data and parity puncture patterns can be matched to the interleaver, thereby maintaining excellent performance for very high code rates. This makes them ideally suited to rate- compatible coding applications. Excellent waterfall and error-flare performance is demonstrated for rate-compatible turbo codes with code rates ranging from 1/3 to 8/9.