Technologies for the next generation of digital terrestrial television broadcasting — A study on spatially coupled LDPC codes

NHK is conducting research on the next generation of digital terrestrial broadcasting to enable large-volume content services such as 8K Super Hi-Vision. In our previous study, we used a low-density parity-check (LDPC) block code scheme and proposed a decoding method that uses the channel response of a dual polarized MIMO transmission to further improve the bit error ratio (BER) performance [3]. LDPC block codes are robust forward error correction (FEC) codes and are Shannon-limit-approaching over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Despite this feature, there is still room for improving the BER performance. In this paper, we propose spatially coupled (SC-) LDPC codes to further improve the BER performance. We also report on our verification using a computer simulation.