New very high rate punctured convolutional codes suitable for Viterbi
decoding are presented. These codes extend recent results on high rate
convolutional codes by employing an efficient computer search techniq
ue and are optimum in that they minimise the residual bit error rate o
ver all puncturing patterns given a particular basis code. Tables of n
ew codes of rate (n - 1)/n are given for n = 9, 10, 11 and 12.