An efficient structure for terminating spatially coupled LDPC codes

A recursive encoding of spatially coupled LDPC codes with low complexity has been proposed in recent works. But it has to solve a system of linear equations to terminate the codes. In this paper we modify the protograph of spatially coupled LDPC codes by adding extra variable nodes, called repeat-accumulate(RA) tail, which can simplify the termination without time delays. Performance analysis with density evolution and simulation results over binary erasure channel(BEC) channels are also provided. Simulation results show that, for spatially coupled LDPC codes with RA tail, the complexity of termination can be reduced with a small trade-off in performance.