New perspectives on braided convolutional codes

Braided convolutional codes (BCCs) are a type of parallel-concatenated convolutional code in which the parity outputs of one component encoder are fed back and used as inputs to the other component encoder at the succeeding time unit. In this paper, we review the published results on BCCs that have appeared in the literature over the past ten years and present a unified view of BCCs in the context of other types of turbo-like codes. We also include some recent results on iterative decoding thresholds for BCCs, weight enumerators and distance growth rates, window decoding for low latency operation, and rate-compatible BCCs for high-rate applications.