Systematic block Markov superposition transmission of repetition codes

In this paper, we propose systematic block Markov superposition transmission of repetition (BMST-R) codes, which can support a wide range of code rates but maintain essentially the same encoding/decoding hardware structure. The systematic BMST-R codes resemble the classical rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) codes, except that they are typically non-decodable by the Viterbi algorithm due to the huge constraint length induced by the block-oriented encoding process. By taking into account that the codes are systematic, the performance of systematic BMST-R codes under maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding can be analyzed with a simple lower bound and an upper bound with the help of partial input-redundancy weight enumerating function (IRWEF). Numerical results verify our analysis and show that systematic BMST-R codes perform well in a wide range of code rates.