Abstract This paper discusses circular buffer rate

matching (CBRM) algorithms for the turbo code in the Long

Term Evolution (LTE) of the WCDMA-based air interface. To
enhance performance at high code rates, systematic bit
puncturing is incorporated in conjunction with the CBRM. The
RM algorithm is further optimized based on the algebraic
properties of the QPP interleavers and the 8-state recursive
systematic convolutional code of the LTE turbo code.
Index Terms turbo codes, rate-matching, circular buffers,
catastrophic puncturing.
I. INTRODUCTION
HE explosive growth of mobile phone users and the
increasing demand for broadband wireless access has led
to the development of a long term evolution (LTE) for the
WCDMA-based air interface by the Third Generation
Partnership Project (3GPP). Some key minimum requirements
of LTE include packet data support with peak data rates of 300
Mbps on the downlink and 50 Mbps on the uplink, a low
maximum latency of 10 ms MAC layer round trip delay, and
flexible bandwidth support. These requirements have led to the
adoption of OFDM based modulation and multiple access,
MIMO antenna schemes, and adaptive modulation and coding
with advanced channel coding and hybrid ARQ protocols.
To address the high data rate requirements of LTE, the
3GPP working group undertook a rigorous evaluation of
advanced channel coding candidates (turbo and LDPC codes).
Consequently, it was decided to adopt the rate-1/3 WCDMA
turbo code with a new contention-free internal interleaver
based on quadratic permutation polynomial (QPP) to facilitate
efficient high speed turbo decoding [1-3]. The QPP interleaver
requires small parameter storage, provides excellent
performance, and, most importantly, allows highly flexible
parallelization due to its maximum contention-free property.
The 3GPP working group also investigated the performance
of the LTE turbo code in conjunction with different rate
matching (RM) algorithm proposals. An RM algorithm repeats
or punctures the bits of a mother codeword to generate a
requested number of bits according to a desired code rate that
may be different from the mother code rate of the turbo coder.
The RM algorithm should also facilitate enhanced hybrid ARQ
(HARQ) operation by minimizing repetition of coded bits
(when possible) for subsequent retransmissions of a packet in
order to increase coding gains via incremental redundancy
(IR). Considering that the RM algorithm in 3GPP HSDPA is
lacking in performance for certain code rates and block sizes,
the topic of RM was extensively studied to devise a better
solution for LTE.
In this paper, we investigate the design and optimization of
low-complexity high-performance RM algorithms based on
circular buffers for LTE. Section II describes the design of the
circular buffer rate matching algorithms with systematic bit
puncturing. The optimization of sub-block interleavers based
on the congruence property of the QPP interleaver is also
presented. The optimization of sub-block interleavers is further
analyzed with the theory of catastrophic puncturing avoidance
in Section III. Numerical analysis is presented in Section IV
and the paper is concluded in Section V.
II. CIRCULAR BUFFER RATE MATCHING DESIGN
The 3GPP turbo code is a systematic parallel concatenated
convolutional code with two 8-state constituent encoders and
one turbo code internal interleaver. Each constituent encoder is
independently terminated by tail bits. For an input block size
of K bits, the output of a turbo encoder consists of three length-
K streams, corresponding to the systematic bit and two parity
bit streams (referred to as the Systematic, Parity 1, and
Parity 2 streams in the following), respectively, as well as 12
tail bits due to trellis termination. Thus, the actual mother code
rate is slightly lower than 1/3. In LTE, the tail bits are
multiplexed to the end of the three streams, whose lengths are
hence increased to (K+4) bits each.
In the circular buffer rate matching (CBRM) method for
rate-1/3 turbo codes [4], each of the three output streams of the
turbo coder is rearranged with its own sub-block interleaver.
Analysis of Circular Buffer Rate Matching for
LTE Turbo Code
Jung-Fu (Thomas) Cheng
*
, Ajit Nimbalker
+
, Yufei Blankenship
+
, Brian Classon
+
, and T. Keith Blankenship
+

*
Ericsson Research, RTP, NC, USA
+
Motorola Labs. Schaumburg, IL, USA
Email: thomas.cheng@ericsson.com, {a.nimbalker, yufei.blankenship, brian.classon, keith.blankenship}@motorola.com
T

Figure 1 Operations of circular buffer rate matching for turbo code.

Then, a single output buffer is formed by placing the
rearranged systematic bits in the beginning followed by bit-by-
bit interlacing of the two rearranged parity streams (see
Figure 1). Interlacing allows equal levels of protection for each
constituent code. Since each sub-block interleaver is typically
based on row-column permutations, the CB can also be
visualized as in 2-dimensional format (1-dimensional CB is
obtained by reading bits column-by column) as shown in
Figure 2. Assuming 32 columns in each sub-block interleaver,
the first 32 columns in Figure 2 represent the 32 columns of
the systematic bits after sub-block interleaving, while the
remaining 64 columns represent bit-by-bit interlaced columns
of the permuted Parity 1 and Parity 2 streams.
For a desired code rate, the number of coded bits N
data
to be
selected for transmission is passed to the RM algorithm. The
bit selection step of the CBRM simply reads out the first N
data

bits from the start of the buffer. In general, the bits to be
selected for transmission can be read out starting from any
point in the buffer. If the end of the buffer is reached, then the
reading continues by wrapping around to the beginning of the
buffer (hence the term circular buffer). Thus, puncturing and
repetition is achieved using a unified method. The CRBM
algorithm has advantages in flexibility (in code rates achieved)
and also granularity (in stream sizes). Typically, low-
complexity sub-block interleavers that facilitate uniform
puncturing at any code rate are preferred [4]. Next, we describe
two performance enhancements that were adopted in the LTE
CBRM algorithm.
A. Systematic Bit Puncturing
Incremental Redundancy (IR) based HARQ operation is a key
performance enabler in LTE. Thus, an LTE RM algorithm is
expected to provide different subsets, denoted by redundancy
version (RV), of the codeword for different transmissions of a
packet (i.e., minimize repetition of coded bits when possible).
In CBRM, different RVs can be specified by simply defining
different starting points (to start reading out) in the CB. For the
first transmission (RV=0), it is conventionally assumed the bits
are read out from the beginning of the CB, which means that
all systematic bits are always selected and puncturing, if
needed, is applied to parity bits only. However, it is well-
known that, for turbo codes with well-designed interleavers,
most of the Hamming weight in the minimum distance (and
other terms in the distance spectrum) resides in the parity
streams. Therefore, if excessive puncturing is applied to the
parity bits, the effective minimum distance of the punctured
code can degrade significantly at high code rates. Therefore a
small amount of systematic bit puncturing has been proposed
in the literature to enhance performance for high coding rates
[5-7].
Initial transmissions with high code rates (with HARQ
operation to improve reliability) are expected in LTE to reach
the aggressive data rate targets. Therefore, for LTE, it was
agreed to puncture a small portion of systematic bits by
starting the first RV (RV=0) at an offset compared to the
beginning of the CB. With the 2-D circular buffer, the
systematic bit puncturing is easily enabled by skipping the first
columns in the CB for first RV. The setting of =2 adopted
in LTE thus results in puncturing ~6% of the systematic bits.
B. Sub-block Interleaver Optimization with Address Offset
In LTE a total of 188 byte-aligned QPP interleavers are defined
for the turbo code [1]. Each QPP interleaver has the even-even
property by which even indices in the input block are mapped
to even indices after the permutation. Keeping this under
consideration, for the CBRM, consider a sub-block interleaver
of length K+4 derived as follows, where K is the QPP
interleaver length. The input block is written row-by row
starting from the top row into a ceil((K+4)/32)32 matrix
(dummy bits prepended if the matrix is not full). The columns
are then permuted via a length-32 permutation given below.
ColPerm =
[0, 16, 8, 24, 4, 20, 12, 28, 2, 18, 10, 26, 6, 22, 14, 30,
1, 17, 9, 25, 5, 21, 13, 29, 3, 19, 11, 27, 7, 23, 15, 31]. (1)
The output of the subblock interleaver is then generated by
reading the column-permuted matrix column-by-column
nominally starting from the 1
st
column (dummy bits are
skipped). It can be seen that the sub-block interleaver places all
even indices followed by all odd indices in the rearranged sub-
block (ignoring the tail bits). Thus, if the same sub-block
interleaver is used for all three streams to form the CB, due to
the even-even property of the QPP interleaver, the first K bits
following the systematic bits in the CB are associated with K/2
even-indexed positions in the 1
st
constituent encoder and K/2
even indexed positions in the 2
nd
constituent encoder leading to
unequal levels of protection for odd and even indices of the
input block. This can be remedied by modifying the sub-block
permutation of the second parity stream such that all odd
indices are placed in the front, followed by all even indices.
Thus, for index i, if
sys
(i) denotes the permutation of the
systematic sub-block interleaver, then the permutations of the
two parity sub-block interleavers are given by
par0
(i) =
sys
(i),
and
par1
(i) = (
sys
(i)+) mod (K+4), where denotes an offset.
In summary, the CBRM algorithms to be investigated in this
paper can be characterized by the two parameters and . The
baseline algorithm with systematic bit puncturing but no sub-
block interleaver offset is referred to as the CBRM(=2,=0)
algorithm. Exploiting the congruence property of the QPP
interleavers, the enhanced CBRM(=2,=1) algorithms sets the
sub-block interleaver offset to =1.

Figure 2 Conceptual composition of a circular buffer for LTE turbo
code rate matching. White, red and blue cells contains bits from the
Systematic, Parity 1 and Parity 2 streams, respectively. Green cells
mark starting points of redundancy versions defined for RM. The
number of columns for each stream is 32 (not shown to scale).

III. AVOIDING CATASTROPHIC PUNCTURING IN CBRM
To reap the full benefits of systematic bit puncturing, it is
important to avoid catastrophic puncturing. In particular, the
overall encoding process (including turbo encoder and RM)
could become catastrophic if all (or almost all) the parity
weight corresponding to an input bit sequence of potentially
infinite weight is punctured away [8]. With low Hamming
weights, small amounts of channel noise can induce the
decoder to make completely wrong decisions, resulting in very
high block error rates (BLER). The catastrophic puncturing
patterns for the 8-state constituent codes studied in [9] are used
to analyze the CBRM algorithms.
A. Catastrophic Puncturing in CBRM (=2,=0)
The operations of the CBRM algorithms have a period of 32
due to the length-32 row-column subblock permutation. Thus,
skipping the first =2 columns in the CB induces a periodic
systematic bit puncturing in the 1
st
constituent code,
represented by the following periodic puncturing mask:
Systematic Puncturing Mask =
[01111111111111110111111111111111], (2)
where 1 and 0 indicate retaining and discarding of systematic
bits at the corresponding positions, respectively. The positions
in the first period are further distinguished by bold letters. The
corresponding parity bit puncturing patterns to avoid are
classified in the following critical bit mask [9]:
Period-16 Critical Parity Bit Mask =
[xCCxxCxCCCxxCxCCxCCxxCxCCCxxCxCC], (3)
where C and x indicate critical and uncritical parity bit
positions, respectively. To avoid catastrophic puncturing, at
least one critical parity bit in each period of 16 should be
retained by the rate matcher.
Interestingly, the QPP permutation also has some periodic
properties. For a QPP interleaver with a block size divisible by
16 it can be shown (using the maximum contention-free
property) that for any integer k,

QPP
(16k) mod 16 = 0 (4)
In LTE, all QPP block sizes with K512 and half of those with
K<512 are divisible by 16. As a consequence, due to
interaction of the periodicities of the CBRM and the QPP
permutation, =2 induces the same periodic-16 systematic bit
puncturing pattern in the second constituent code also.
To examine the effective parity bit puncturing pattern of the
CBRM (=2,=0), the critical bit mask of (3) has to be
permuted by the inter-column permutation pattern of (1):
Critical Bit Mask for Parity 1 and Parity 2 in the CB =
[xxCCxxCCCCxxxxCCCCCCCCxxxxxxCCCC]. (5)
This allows us to make the following analysis assuming RV=0.
For coding rates r 32/34 (~0.94), the transmitted bits
consist of 30 columns of the Systematic stream and no more
than 2 columns for each of the Parity streams. From (5), it is
clear that the encoding is catastrophic since none of the critical
parity bits are retained.
For coding rates 32/38 r 32/34, the transmitted bits
consist of 30 columns of the Systematic stream and no more
than 4 columns for each of the parity streams. Since, only a
small number of the parity bits are retained from the critical
positions in both constituent codes, the performance may
suffer even though a total catastrophic puncturing is avoided.
As more and more critical parity bits are retained in the two
constituent codes (i.e., as code rate reduces), iterative decoding
enables the two constituent codes to cooperate and recover
some of the critical punctured positions. However, this
recovery is dependent of the specific QPP permutation.
Although catastrophic puncturing is avoided, performance
instability can cause BLER performance flooring for certain
block sizes.
For coding rates r 32/38 (~0.84), the transmitted bits
consist of 30 columns of the Systematic stream and more than
4 columns for each of parity stream. Catastrophic puncturing
in both constituent codes is avoided as at least one critical
parity bit position is retained periodically.
Therefore, the CBRM(=2,=0) algorithm is expected to
perform poorly for code rate r 32/34=0.94. The performance
should gradually improve as the coding rate decreases toward
32/38=0.84. For code rate r 0.84, its performance should
become competitive to other well-designed RM algorithms.
B. Partial Catastrophic Puncturing Avoidance in
CBRM(=2,=1)
The modification of the subblock interleaver for the Parity 2
stream introduced in the last section can be examined from the
angle of alleviating catastrophic puncturing problems at high
coding rates. With an offset of =1 to the Parity 2 interleaving
address, the critical bit mask for the Parity 2 stream becomes
Critical Bit Mask for Parity 2 CB =
[CCCCCCxxxxxxCCCCCCxxxxCCxxCCCCxx]. (6)
The critical parity bit mask for the Parity 1 stream is the same
as (5). We can make the following observations (for RV=0).
For coding rates r 32/38, the transmitted bits consist of 30
columns of the Systematic stream and more than 4 columns for
each of the parity streams. Catastrophic puncturing is avoided
in both constituent codes.
For coding rates 32/38 r 32/34, transmitted bits for
RV=0 consist of 30 columns of the Systematic stream and no
more than 4 columns for each of the parity streams. Therefore,
catastrophic puncturing is avoided in the 2
nd
constituent code
but such avoidance is not guaranteed in the 1
st
constituent
code. However, as more and more critical parity bits are
retained, statistical avoidance through iterative decoding can
aid the recovery process similar to that described for the
CBRM(=2,=0) algorithm.
For coding rates r 32/34, the transmitted bits consist of 30
columns of the Systematic stream and no more than 2 columns
of each of the parity streams. Thus, while certain critical parity
bits are retained in the 2
nd
constituent code, the puncturing in

the 1
st
constituent code remains catastrophic. The weakness in
the 1
st
constituent code could be remedied by the extrinsic
information supplied by the 2
nd
constituent decoder. However,
such statistical avoidance of catastrophic puncturing depends
on the QPP permutation and some performance degradation
may occur for certain block sizes.
From this analysis, for the CBRM (=2,=1) algorithm,
reduced performance is expected for code rate r 0.94 though
this degradation is not a major issue since the highest code rate
in an initial transmission in LTE is expected to be lower than
0.92. The performance improves as the coding rate decreases
though some degradation is expected for certain block sizes
when statistical catastrophic puncturing avoidance is not
effective. For code rate r 0.84, the performance should be
competitive to other well-designed RM algorithms.
C. Catastrophic Puncturing Avoidance in CBRM (=4,=4)
Given the periodic-16 systematic bit puncturing induced by
=2 and the column permutation given in (1), it is not possible
to find a single offset to avoid catastrophic puncturing in
both constituent codes for all LTE block sizes. The search of
an alternative period for systematic bit puncturing is
constrained by the properties of LTE QPP interleavers. More
specifically, if the period is not a divisor of the interleaver
length K, then a periodic puncturing in the 1
st
constituent code
becomes aperiodic in the 2
nd
constituent code, thus making a
systematic optimization intractable. Therefore, period 8 is the
remaining choice for the systematic bit puncturing. Toward this
end, a new algorithm is devised by setting =4 (i.e., skipping
the first four columns of the systematic stream). This induces
the following periodic puncturing mask for the Systematic
stream:
Systematic Puncturing Mask =
[01111111011111110111111101111111]. (7)
Since all QPP interleaver lengths in LTE [1] are divisible by 8,
we have

QPP
(8k) mod 8 = 0 (8)
for any integer k. Thus, for all the LTE QPP permutations, this
setting introduces identical periodic-8 systematic bit
puncturing for both constituent codes. The corresponding
critical parity bit mask is given by the following [9]:
Critical Parity Bit Mask =
[CxCxCCCxCxCxCCCxCxCxCCCxCxCxCCCx]. (9)
For the Parity 1 stream, the critical bit mask after column
permutation is given by
Critical Bit Mask for Parity 1 CB =
[CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCxxxxCCCCxxxxxxxx]. (10)
With offset =4, the critical bit mask for the Parity 2 stream
becomes
Critical Bit Mask for Parity 2 CB =
[CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCxxxxxxxxxxxx]. (11)
We can make the following analysis.
For coding rates r 32/36, transmitted bits for RV=0
consist of 28 columns of the Systematic stream and more than
4 columns for each of the parity streams. Catastrophic
puncturing is avoided in both constituent codes.
For coding rates r 32/36, transmitted bits for RV=0
consist of 28 columns of the Systematic stream and no more
than 4 columns for each of the parity streams. Catastrophic
puncturing avoidance cannot be guaranteed. However, as with
previous two algorithms, iterative decoding could provide
statistical avoidance for certain block sizes.
From this analysis, it can be expected that the performance
of the CBRM (=4,=4) algorithm to be competitive for rates r
32/36= 0.89. The performance degrades as the coding rate
increases as some critical parity bits will be left out and
statistical avoidance kicks in and the degradation could be
severe for certain block sizes when statistical catastrophic
puncturing avoidance is not effective.
IV. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
Extensive simulation results based on the following setup is
generated to verify the analysis presented in the previous
sections. The performance of the LTE turbo code with the 188
block sizes corresponding to all LTE QPP interleavers [1] is
tested at six code rates: r = 0.4, 0.5, , 0.9, with RV=0. The
simulations assume an additive white Gaussian noise channel
with QPSK modulation and 8 iterations of an enhanced max-
log-MAP turbo decoder with extrinsic scaling factor of
0.75 [10]. It is noted here that during the performance
analysis, it was also found that the performance of RM
algorithms also depend on whether the simple max-log-MAP
algorithm or the enhanced max-log-MAP algorithm is used.
Figure 3(a) shows the SNR required for the
CBRM(=2,=0) algorithm at code rate r=0.9 and three
different BLER targets (10%, 1% or 0.2%) are plotted with
blue curves. It can be observed the SNR required varies widely
indicating inconsistent performance (or SNR spikes).
Furthermore, the performance tends to deteriorate with
increasing block sizes, thereby negating the turbo code
interleaver gain that improves performance at longer blocks.
The improvement with the CBRM(=2,=1) algorithm is
shown in Figure 3(b). Most of the SNR spikes are removed
and the performance trends are consistent with typical turbo
code behavior. Thus, the improved rate-matcher setting =1
results in an improvement of up to 4 dB compared to the
CBRM with =0. However, at low BLER such as 2e-3, the
performance improvement is not substantial at a few block
sizes (including K = 208, 1792 and 5824). Performance for
these sizes can be improved by simply choosing a different
value for (not preferred for implementation). Figure 3(c)
shows the performance the CBRM(=4,=4) algorithm. There
is consistent performance for all block sizes larger than 1000
bits though some SNR spikes remain for small block sizes. It is
further observed that the CBRM(=4,=4) algorithm is slightly
worse than the CBRM(=2,=1) algorithm for small blocks,
perhaps due to large amount systematic puncturing associated
with the CBRM(=4,=4) algorithm.

Figure 4 shows the performance of the CBRM(=2,=1)
and CBRM(=4,=4) algorithms at code rate r=0.8. The figure
shows the benefits of avoiding catastrophic puncturing in both
constituent codes. At code rates of r=0.7 and lower, the three
RM algorithms perform identically as shown in Figure 5.
In general, the performance spikes at very low BLERs and
high coding rates are not problematic because high coding
rates usually occur in initial transmissions where relatively
high BLERs are targeted. Subsequent retransmissions based on
IR lead to a lower coding rate and relatively low target BLER.
Thus, both CBRM(=2,=1) and CBRM(=4,=4) are suitable
candidates for LTE RM due to their consistent performances
across the wide-range of code rates, block sizes and BLERs.
V. CONCLUSION
Based on the algebraic properties of the QPP interleavers and
the 8-state recursive systematic convolutional code, three rate-
matching algorithms based circular buffers were studied for
LTE. The baseline CBRM(=2,=0) algorithm was shown to
provide deteriorating performance at high coding rates. The
improved CBRM(=2,=1) algorithm eliminates most of these
performance instabilities and achieves good performance over
wide range of code rates. A third algorithm CBRM(=4,=4)
was also shown to provide more consistent performance for
certain scenarios. In conclusion, the CBRM(=2,=1)
algorithm offers balanced performance over the block size and
code rate ranges of interest. This algorithm was hence adopted
for the LTE system.
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(a) CBRM(=2,=0) (b) CBRM(=2,=1) (c) CBRM(=4,=4)
Figure 3 Required E
b
/N
0
for code rate r=0.9. Blue curves show the actual SNR values for the indicated BLER targets and block sizes. Red
curves represent estimated trends when SNR spikes are removed.

(a) CBRM(=2,=1) (b) CBRM(=4,=4) Figure 5 Required E
b
/N
0
for code rate r=0.7.
Figure 4 Required E
b
/N
0
for code rate r=0.8. Blue curves show actual SNR values for the
indicated BLER targets and block sizes. Red curves represent estimated trends.