Nested Tail-Biting Convolutional Codes Construction for Short Packet Communications

Tail-biting convolutional codes (TBCCs) have become a research hotspot in the short-block-length regime due to the growing interest in strong short packet com-munications with low latency and ultra-reliability. TBCCs can maintain the decoding performance without rate loss caused by the tailed bits in the traditional convolutional encoder, which also have good rate compatibility with bet¬ter decoding performance than those of the iterative scheme for short block length codes. In this paper, a search algorithm is proposed to construct a set of rate-compatible TBCCs (RC-TBCCs) with consistent good frame error rate (FER) performance for fixed information length at various code rates. The algorithm considers the minimum distance profile of TBCCs. A set of RC-TBCCs is constructed for code rates from 1/3 to 1/8. The simulation results show that the proposed RC-TBCCs are superior to the LTE standard RC-TBCCs at different code rates.