The Effect of Coupling Memory and Block Length on Spatially Coupled Serially Concatenated Codes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how coupling memory and block length affect the performance, complexity, and latency of spatially coupled serially concatenated codes, providing design guidelines for flexible and efficient code construction.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of parameter tradeoffs in SC-SCCs, enabling independent optimization of block length and coupling memory for improved performance.

Findings

Coupling memory and block length can be exchanged without affecting latency and complexity.

SC-SCCs outperform uncoupled ensembles at fixed latency and complexity.

Design guidelines facilitate flexible code design across various scenarios.

Abstract

Spatially coupled serially concatenated codes (SC-SCCs) are a class of spatially coupled turbo-like codes, which have a close-to-capacity performance and low error floor. In this paper we investigate the impact of coupling memory, block length, decoding window size, and number of iterations on the performance, complexity, and latency of SC-SCCs. Several design tradeoffs are presented to see the relation between these parameters in a wide range. Also, our analysis provides design guidelines for SC-SCCs in different scenarios to make the code design independent of block length. As a result, block length and coupling memory can be exchanged flexibly without changing the latency and complexity. Also, we observe that the performance of SC-SCCs is improved with respect to the uncoupled ensembles for a fixed latency and complexity.