On the Global and Local Decoding of q-Ary SC-LDPC Codes With Moderate Coupling Length

Abstract

This letter discusses a special type of q-ary spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes with the potential for local decoding (LD). We demonstrate that q-ary SC-LDPCL (suffix “L” stands for locality) code ensembles have better decoding thresholds than the corresponding binary ensembles. We also develop local window decoding (LWD) to improve local decoding performance. The q-ary codes are constructed from low-order finite fields that guarantees relatively low complexity. The provided examples show that q-ary SC-LDPCL codes outperform the corresponding binary codes in both global and local decoding.