Performance analysis of spatially coupled codes over the correlated erasure channel

Desirable characteristics of spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes including low implementation complexity, low-delay, and close-to-optimal performance over a wide variety of channels make them a noticeable candidate for the next-generation wireless communication standards. However, error performance of the sliding window decoding scheme used to decode these codes is considerably degraded over channels with memory, such as the burst erasure channel. Traditionally, communication over channels with memory is achieved through the use of block interleavers but as it introduces a large amount of delay, it is not always a viable option. In this paper, employing a convolutional interleaver which benefits from the inherent convolutional nature of the spatially-coupled codes with very low overall delay is considered. The performance of the proposed combination is analyzed using the density evolution technique. The performance improvement of using a convolutional inter-leaver is demonstrated as a function of the added interleaving delay in terms of iterative decoding thresholds.