Asymptotic weight enumerators of randomly punctured, expurgated, and shortened code ensembles

In this paper, we examine the effect of random puncturing, expurgating, and shortening on the asymptotic weight enumerator of certain linear code ensembles. We begin by discussing the actions of the three alteration methods on individual codes. We derive expressions for the average resulting code weight enumerator under each alteration. We then extend these results to the spectral shape of linear code ensembles whose original spectral shape is known, and demonstrate our findings on two specific code ensembles: the Shannon ensemble and the regular (j, k) Gallager ensemble.