In this paper, we introduce the concept of spatially coupled turbo codes
(SC-TCs), as the turbo codes counterpart of spatially coupled low-density
parity-check codes. We describe spatial coupling for both Berrou et al. and
Benedetto et al. parallel and serially concatenated codes. For the binary
erasure channel, we derive the exact density evolution (DE) equations of SC-TCs
by using the method proposed by Kurkoski et al. to compute the decoding erasure
probability of convolutional encoders. Using DE, we then analyze the asymptotic
behavior of SC-TCs. We observe that the belief propagation (BP) threshold of
SC-TCs improves with respect to that of the uncoupled ensemble and approaches
its maximum a posteriori threshold. This phenomenon is especially significant
for serially concatenated codes, whose uncoupled ensemble suffers from a poor
BP threshold.Comment: in Proc. 8th International Symposium on Turbo Codes & Iterative
Information Processing 2014, Bremen, Germany, August 2014. To appear. (The
PCC ensemble is changed with respect to the one in the previous version of
the paper. However, it gives identical thresholds
