Performances of Serial Concatenated Zigzag Codes for High Rate Application

Zigzag code is a family of forward error correcting code similar to the single parity check codes. The code itself is a very weak code since the minimum Hamming distance of any code is equal to two. Zigzag codes can provide some protections in high data rate application tolerable to few errors such as real-time multimedia transmission. In this paper, we show the performances improvement when multiple zigzag encoders are cascaded directly, each of them separated by a random and different interleaver. We show that, for a very high rate application, the performances improved tremendously with very little rate deterioration. The complexity of the overall decoder is linearly proportional to the number of encoder cascaded. The results are compared to LDPC codes with similar blocksizes and rate.