A (very) brief introduction to spatially coupled codes
Prof. Alexandre Graell i Amat
Chalmers University of Technology
In this lecture we will introduce the main concepts of spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes, a class of codes introduced in the early 2000s and that has received a great deal of attention in the last decade. SC-LDPC codes have the remarkable feature that their belief propagation decoding threshold saturates to the maximum a posteriori decoding threshold. In other words, asymptotically, the suboptimal BP decoding of SC-LDPC performs as good as the optimal decoding.
We will then show that spatial coupling is a generic concept that can be applied to other classes of codes such as turbo-like and product codes as well as to scenarios that go beyond the coding realm.
Alexandre Graell i Amat received the MSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, and the MSc and the PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy.
In February 2011 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests are in the areas of (modern) coding theory, distributed storage, and optical communications.
Alexandre is currently serving as Editor at Large for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS. He received the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship of the European Commission and was awarded the IEEE Communications Society "2010 Europe, Middle East & Africa Region Outstanding Young Researcher Award".