Self-Connected Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes with Improved Termination

This paper investigates the design of self-connected spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes. First, a termination method is proposed to reduce rate loss. Particularly, a single-side open SC-LDPC ensemble is introduced, which halves the rate loss of a conventional terminated SC-LDPC by reducing the number of check nodes. We further propose a self-connection method that allows reliable information to propagate from several directions to improve the decoding threshold. We demonstrate that the proposed ensembles not only achieve a better trade-off between rate loss and gap to capacity than several existing protograph SC-LDPC codes with short chain lengths but also exhibit threshold saturation behavior. Finite blocklength error performance is provided to exemplify the superiority of the proposed codes over conventional protograph SC-LDPC codes.

Windowed Decoding for Delayed Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation

Delayed bit-interleaved coded modulation (DBICM) generalizes bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) by modulating differently delayed sub-blocks of codewords onto the same signals. DBICM improves transmission reliability over BICM due to its capability of detecting undelayed sub-blocks with the extrinsic information of the decoded delayed sub-blocks. In this work, we propose a novel windowed decoding algorithm for DBICM, which uses the extrinsic information of both the decoded delayed and undelayed sub-blocks, to improve the detection on all sub-blocks. Numerical results show that the proposed windowed decoding significantly outperforms the original decoding.

Connecting Spatially Coupled LDPC Code Chains for Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation

This paper investigates the design of spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes constructed from connected-chain ensembles for bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) schemes. For short coupling lengths, connecting multiple SC-LDPC chains can improve decoding performance over single-chains and impose structured unequal error protection (UEP). A joint design of connected-chain ensembles and bit mapping to further exploit the UEP from codes and high-order modulations is proposed. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design over existing connected-chain ensembles and over single-chain ensembles with existing bit mapping design.