Design of Concatenated Product Codes with Spatially-Coupled LDPC Codes

In this paper, we introduce a novel coding scheme that concatenates product codes with spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes, termed PC-SC-LDPC codes, for next-generation wireless (and wireline) communications. These codes exhibit significant performance improvement in both waterfall and error-floor regions, compared to conventional schemes. We further correct residual errors through tailored interleaving strategies. Numerical results demonstrate that our approach can achieve a 1.2 dB gain at a bit error rate (BER) target of 10
⁻⁸
. Moreover, we offer a semi-analytical approach to estimate that the error floor of our designed PC-SC-LDPC codes falls below 10
⁻¹⁵
.