A Spatially Coupled PAC Coding Scheme and Its List Decoding

In order to promote the reliability and efficiency of transport block (TB)-based transmission, we propose a new class of spatially coupled Polarization-Adjusted Convolutional (PAC) coding scheme in this paper. In the proposed scheme, several consecutive code blocks (CBs) in each TB are coupled by the register states at the end of the encoding of each CB, and a depth-first successive-cancellation list (SCL)-based decoder is used for decoding. The proposed spatially coupled PAC codes introduce little coding complexity at the encoding side, and the coupling procedure is able to significantly mitigate the TB error rate (TBER), which are validated by extensive simulation results.