IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)
Improving spatially coupled LDPC codes by connecting chains
Dmitri V. Truhachev, David G. M. Mitchell, Michael Lentmaier, Daniel J. Costello
Abstract
In this paper, we study ensembles of connected spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes (SC-LDPCCs), i.e., ensembles described by graphs in which regular SC-LDPCC chains of various lengths serve as edges. We show that, by carefully connecting individual SC-LDPCC chains, we obtain LDPC code ensembles with improved iterative decoding thresholds compared to those of a single coupled chain, in addition to reducing the decoding complexity required to achieve a specific bit error probability. Moreover, we show that, like the component SC-LDPCC chains, the proposed constructions have a typical minimum distance that grows linearly with block length.