Threshold Computation for Spatially Coupled Turbo-Like Codes on the AWGN Channel

Abstract

In this paper, we perform a belief propagation (BP) decoding threshold analysis of spatially coupled (SC) turbo-like codes (TCs) (SC-TCs) on the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. We review Monte-Carlo density evolution (MC-DE) and efficient prediction methods, which determine the BP thresholds of SC-TCs over the AWGN channel. We demonstrate that instead of performing time-consuming MC-DE computations, the BP threshold of SC-TCs over the AWGN channel can be predicted very efficiently from their binary erasure channel (BEC) thresholds. From threshold results, we conjecture that the similarity of MC-DE and predicted thresholds is related to the threshold saturation capability as well as capacity-approaching maximum a posteriori (MAP) performance of an SC-TC ensemble.

Keywords

• spatially coupled codes
• turbo codes
• concatenated convolutional codes
• density evolution
• iterative decoding
• coding thresholds