When applying the symbol-wise puncturing, there is a constraint on the symbol length of the first transmission. Since we require the amplitude bits to satisfy k a = n c (m − 2)/m, the length of information bits must be greater than k a and the LDPC code rate satisfies
R = k c n c ≥ m − 2 m .(3)
If the receiver successfully recovers the **data** block after the t-th transmission, the transmission code rate is increased to
R t = k c m t j=1 n j , 1 ≤ t ≤ t max .(4)
Then, the code rate R t is bounded by
k c n c ≤ R t < 1, 1 ≤ t ≤ t max .(5)
For t = 1, k c m · n 1 < 1.