Finite-Length Analysis of Spatially-Coupled Regular LDPC Ensembles on Burst-Erasure Channels

Regular spatially-coupled low-density parity-check ensembles have gained significant interest, since they were shown to universally achieve the capacity of binary memoryless channels under low-complexity belief-propagation decoding. In this paper, we focus primarily on the performance of these ensembles over binary channels affected by bursts of erasures. We first develop an analysis of the finite length performance for a single burst per code word and no errors otherwise. We first assume that the burst erases a complete spatial position, modeling for instance node failures in distributed storage. We provide new tight lower bounds for the block erasure probability (PB) at finite block length and bounds on the coupling parameter for being asymptotically able to recover the burst. We further show that expurgating the ensemble can improve the block erasure probability by several orders of magnitude. Later we extend our methodology to more general channel models. In a first extension, we consider bursts that can start at a random location in the code word and span across multiple spatial positions. Besides the finite length analysis, we determine by means of density evolution the maximum correctable burst length. In a second extension, we consider the case where in addition to a single burst, random bit erasures may occur. Finally, we consider a block erasure channel model which erases each spatial position independently with some probability p, potentially introducing multiple bursts simultaneously. All results are verified using Monte-Carlo simulations.