Windowed decoding of spatially coupled codes

We study windowed decoding of spatially coupled codes when the transmission occurs over the binary erasure channel. We characterize the performance of this scheme by defining thresholds on channel erasure rates that guarantee a target bit erasure rate. We give analytical lower bounds on these thresholds and show that the performance approaches that of belief propagation exponentially fast in the window size. We give numerical results including the thresholds computed using density evolution and the erasure rate curves for finite-length spatially coupled codes.