Continuous Transmission of Spatially-Coupled LDPC Code Chains

TL;DR

This paper introduces a continuous chain transmission scheme for spatially-coupled LDPC codes that enhances finite-length performance with minimal increase in complexity and delay, by connecting multiple code chains in a layered, continuous manner.

Contribution

It presents a novel continuous chain transmission method that improves finite-length performance of SC-LDPC codes by connecting multiple chains, applicable to various code ensembles.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over traditional methods.

Minimal increase in decoding complexity and delay.

Effective for multiple SC-LDPC code ensembles.

Abstract

We propose a novel encoding/transmission scheme called continuous chain (CC) transmission that is able to improve the finite-length performance of a system using spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes. In CC transmission, instead of transmitting a sequence of independent codewords from a terminated SC-LDPC code chain, we connect multiple chains in a layered format, where encoding, transmission, and decoding are now performed in a continuous fashion. The connections between chains are created at specific points, chosen to improve the finite-length performance of the code structure under iterative decoding. We describe the design of CC schemes for different SC-LDPC code ensembles constructed from protographs: a (J,K)-regular SC-LDPC code chain, a spatially-coupled repeat-accumulate (SC-RA) code, and a spatially-coupled accumulate-repeat-jagged-accumulate (SC- ARJA) code. In all cases, significant performance improvements are reported and, in addition, it is shown that using CC transmission only requires a small increase in decoding complexity and decoding delay with respect to a system employing a single SC-LDPC code chain for transmission.