Enhancing Spatially Coupled Serially Concatenated Codes via Multidimensional Coupling

Abstract

The spatially coupled turbo-like codes (SC-TCs) provide a new way to trade-off the performances between the water-fall region and the error-floor region. As a subclass of SC-TCs, spatially coupled serially concatenated codes (SC-SCCs) admit good performances in the error-floor region. This paper is concerned with the construction of SC-SCCs with improved water-fall performances. Particularly, we present the multidimensionally coupled serially concatenated codes (MC-SCCs), in which multiple SC-SCCs are coupled together in a cyclic manner. Two different decoding schedules are presented for the proposed MC-SCCs. Our comparisons show that, under the constraint of equal decoding latency, a performance gain of about 0.4 dB is obtained with MC-SCC when compared with the underlying SC-SCC. These results show the potential advantages of MC-SCC in streaming applications.