A spatially “Mt. Fuji” coupled (SFC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) ensemble is a modified version of the spatially coupled (SC) LDPC ensemble. Its decoding error probability in the waterfall region has been studied only in an experimental manner. In this paper, we theoretically analyze it over the binary erasure channel by modifying the expected graph evolution (EGE) and covariance evolution (CE) that have been used to analyze the original SC-LDPC ensemble. In particular, we derive the initial condition modified for the SFC-LDPC ensemble. Then, unlike the SC-LDPC ensemble, the SFC-LDPC ensemble has a local minimum on the solution of the EGE and CE. Considering the property of it, we theoretically expect the waterfall curve of the SFC-LDPC ensemble is steeper than that of the SC-LDPC ensemble. In addition, we also confirm it by numerical experiments.

A new type of spatially coupled low density parity check (SCLDPC) code is proposed. This code has two benefits. (1) This code requires less number of iterations to correct the erasures occurring through the binary erasure channel in the waterfall region than that of the usual SCLDPC code. (2) This code has lower error floor than that of the usual SCLDPC code. Proposed code is constructed as a coupled chain of the underlying LDPC codes whose code lengths exponentially increase as the position where the codes exist is close to the middle of the chain. We call our code spatially “Mt. Fuji” coupled LDPC (SFCLDPC) code because the shape of the graph representing the code lengths of underlying LDPC codes at each position looks like Mt. Fuji. By this structure, when the proposed SFCLDPC code and the original SCLDPC code are constructed with the same code rate and the same code length, L (the number of the underlying LDPC codes) of the proposed SFCLDPC code becomes smaller and M (the code lengths of the underlying LDPC codes) of the proposed SFCLDPC code becomes larger than those of the SCLDPC code. These properties of L and M enables the above reduction of the number of iterations and the bit error rate in the error floor region, which are confirmed by the density evolution and computer simulations.

We consider spatially-coupled protograph-based LDPC codes for the three terminal erasure relay channel. It is observed that BP threshold value, the maximal erasure probability of the channel for which decoding error probability converges to zero, of spatially-coupled codes, in particular spatially-coupled MacKay-Neal code, is close to the theoretical limit for the relay channel. Empirical results suggest that spatially-coupled protograph-based LDPC codes have great potential to achieve theoretical limit of a general relay channel.