Finite-length performance of spatially-coupled LDPC codes under TEP decoding

Spatially-coupled (SC) LDPC codes are constructed from a set of L regular sparse codes of length M. In the asymptotic limit of these parameters, SC codes present an excellent decoding threshold under belief propagation (BP) decoding, close to the maximum a posteriori (MAP) threshold of the underlying regular code. In the finite-length regime, we need both dimensions, L and M, to be sufficiently large, yielding a very large code length and decoding latency. In this paper, and for the erasure channel, we show that the finite-length performance of SC codes is improved if we consider the tree-structured expectation propagation (TEP) algorithm in the decoding stage. When applied to the decoding of SC LDPC codes, it allows using shorter codes to achieve similar error rates. We also propose a window-sliding scheme for the TEP decoder to reduce the decoding latency.