Block Markov Superposition Transmission: Construction of Big Convolutional Codes From Short Codes

A construction of big convolutional codes from short codes called block Markov superposition transmission (BMST) is proposed. The BMST is very similar to superposition block Markov encoding (SBME), which has been widely used to prove multiuser coding theorems. The BMST codes can also be viewed as a class of spatially coupled codes, where the generator matrices of the involved short codes (referred to as basic codes) are coupled. The encoding process of BMST can be as fast as that of the basic code, while the decoding process can be implemented as an iterative sliding-window decoding algorithm with a tunable delay. More importantly, the performance of BMST can be simply lower bounded in terms of the transmission memory given that the performance of the short code is available. Numerical results show that: 1) the lower bounds can be matched with a moderate decoding delay in the low bit-error-rate (BER) region, implying that the iterative sliding-window decoding algorithm is near optimal; 2) BMST with repetition codes and single parity-check codes can approach the Shannon limit within 0.5 dB at the BER of 10^-5 for a wide range of code rates; and 3) BMST can also be applied to nonlinear codes.