DENSITY EVOLUTION ANALYSIS OF PUNCTURED IRIG-106 LDPC CODES: TOWARD CONTESTED SPECTRUM RESILIENCY

Recently, random puncturing was shown to be a promising solution to reduce the coding over head and improve the spectral efficiency of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes designed for the continuous phase modulation (CPM) waveforms of the Advanced-Range TeleMetry (ARTM) program. In this paper, we perform an asymptotic iterative decoding analysis of punctured ARTM LDPC codes. We determine iterative decoding thresholds for this family of codes for structured and unstructured puncturing patterns. Prudent selection of puncturing patterns will allow us to create spectrally efficient codes of various rates across the target operational regime. We show that it is possible to identify puncturing patterns in the underlying code protographs that result in catastrophic iterative decoding failure, thereby informing the combinatorial search for robust puncturing schemes that preserve performance while enabling tactical rate adaptation.