On the Design of LDPC-Convolutional Ensembles Using the TEP Decoder

Low-density parity-check convolutional (LDPCC) codes asymptotically achieve channel capacity under belief propagation (BP) decoding. In this paper, we decode LDPCC codes using the Tree-Expectation Propagation (TEP) decoder, recently proposed as an alternative decoding method to the BP algorithm for the binary erasure channel (BEC). We show that, for LDPCC codes, the TEP decoder improves the BP solution with a comparable complexity or, alternatively, it allows using shorter codes to achieve similar error rates. We also propose a window-sliding scheme for the TEP decoder to reduce the decoding latency.