Improved sliding window decoding of spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes

Spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes can achieve capacity approaching performance with a small message recovery latency due to the sliding window decoding (SWD). Using a partial Tanner graph, the SWD performs iterative message passing until the average error probability P
_e
of the target symbols falls below a threshold or the maximum iteration number is reached. However, P
_e
does not decrease monotonically as iteration progresses. This implies the symbol likelihoods that were yielded when the decoding terminates may not be optimal for making decisions. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved SWD (ISWD) for SC-LDPC codes. The proposal monitors the achievable minimum of P
_e
and stores its associated likelihoods, so that when the decoding terminates the target symbols will be estimated based on the stored likelihoods. Our research shows the ISWD is able to enhance the decoding performance, especially in the waterfall region. It exhibits an asymptotic convergence to the SWD performance. A complexity reducing variant of the ISWD is also proposed to facilitate the decoding but at the cost of error-correction performance.