Spatially Coupled Turbo-Like Codes

Abstract: The focus of this thesis is on proposing and analyzing a powerful class of codes on graphs---with trellis constraints---that can simultaneously approach capacity and achieve very low error floor. In particular, we propose the concept of spatial coupling for turbo-like code (SC-TC) ensembles and investigate the impact of coupling on the performance of these codes. The main elements of this study can be summarized by the following four major topics. First, we considered the spatial coupling of parallel concatenated codes (PCCs), serially concatenated codes (SCCs), and hybrid concatenated codes (HCCs).We also proposed two extensions of braided convolutional codes (BCCs) to higher coupling memories. Second, we investigated the impact of coupling on the asymptotic behavior of the proposed ensembles in term of the decoding thresholds. For that, we derived the exact density evolution (DE) equations of the proposed SC-TC ensembles over the binary erasure channel. Using the DE equations, we found the thresholds of the coupled and uncoupled ensembles under belief propagation (BP) decoding for a wide range of rates. We also computed the maximum a-posteriori (MAP) thresholds of the underlying uncoupled ensembles. Our numerical results confirm that TCs have excellent MAP thresholds, and for a large enough coupling memory, the BP threshold of an SC-TC ensemble improves to the MAP threshold of the underlying TC ensemble. This phenomenon is called threshold saturation and we proved its occurrence for SC-TCs by use of a proof technique based on the potential function of the ensembles.Third, we investigated and discussed the performance of SC-TCs in the finite length regime. We proved that under certain conditions the minimum distance of an SC-TCs is either larger or equal to that of its underlying uncoupled ensemble. Based on this fact, we performed a weight enumerator (WE) analysis for the underlying uncoupled ensembles to investigate the error floor performance of the SC-TC ensembles. We computed bounds on the error rate performance and minimum distance of the TC ensembles. These bounds indicate very low error floor for SCC, HCC, and BCC ensembles, and show that for HCC, and BCC ensembles, the minimum distance grows linearly with the input block length.The results from the DE and WE analysis demonstrate that the performance of TCs benefits from spatial coupling in both waterfall and error floor regions. While uncoupled TC ensembles with close-to-capacity performance exhibit a high error floor, our results show that SC-TCs can simultaneously approach capacity and achieve very low error floor.Fourth, we proposed a unified ensemble of TCs that includes all the considered TC classes. We showed that for each of the original classes of TCs, it is possible to find an equivalent ensemble by proper selection of the design parameters in the unified ensemble. This unified ensemble not only helps us to understand the connections and trade-offs between the TC ensembles but also can be considered as a bridge between TCs and generalized low-density parity check codes.