Design and analysis of punctured terminated spatially coupled protograph LDPC codes with small coupling lengths

Spatially coupled protograph (SC-P) low-density parity-check codes can achieve excellent performance and simple implementation when the coupling length is sufficiently large. However, in the case of small coupling lengths, terminated SC-P (TE-SC-P) codes suffer from relatively weaker decoding thresholds and lower code rates compared with the original protograph codes. To address the above issues, we propose a novel design method to enhance the performance of such TE-SC-P codes. Specifically, we develop a bus-topology-like puncturing rule so as to formulate a new family of SC-P codes, referred to as punctured TE-SC-P (P-TE-SC-P) codes. Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the proposed P-TE-SC-P codes possess significant performance gains over conventional SC-P codes and randomly punctured TE-SC-P (called RP-TE-SC-P) codes with relatively higher computational complexity.