A Strategy to Detect Error Propagation in Sliding Window Decoding of SC-LDPC Codes

Spatially Coupled Low-Density Parity-Check (SCLDPC) codes are characterized by very long codeword lengths. For this reason, they are usually decoded with sliding window algorithms, which allow piecewise processing and decoding of the codeword symbols. In order to mitigate error propagation, it is possible to adapt strategies, such as non-uniform window sizes and node doping. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive decoding schedule, which can be integrated with the aforementioned strategies. Numerical results confirm that the proposed approach can successfully detect error propagation events with more accuracy than conventional log-likelihood ratio-based approaches. Simulation results show that the error rate performance of time-invariant SC-LDPC codes significantly improves when the proposed strategies are adopted.