A new approach to the construction of high-rate convolutional codes

This letter presents a new technique to construct high-rate convolutional c odes using a structure formed by a high-rate block code and a simpler convo lutional code. The goal is to obtain good convolutional codes in terms of f ree distance and number of nearest neighbors, with better performance than punctured codes. The obtained codes improve over the best known high-rate p unctured codes with the same rate and memory in terms of both bit error pro bability and computational decoding complexity.