Protograph design for spatially-coupled codes to attain an arbitrary diversity order

This work focuses on the design of SC-LDPC codes for transmission over non-ergodic, block-fading channels. Our main contribution is an algorithm, allowing to start from a (J,K)-regular, uncoupled LDPC ensemble, from which one can recursively build up a protograph-based SC-LDPC ensemble having any target diversity order d. The diversity order is achieved assuming a low-complexity iterative decoding algorithm. The increase of d comes at the cost of increasing the memory constraint (i.e., the coupling parameter) of the SC-LDPC ensemble.