In this paper, we investigate the impact of spatial coupling on the
thresholds of turbo-like codes. Parallel concatenated and serially concatenated
convolutional codes as well as braided convolutional codes (BCCs) are compared
by means of an exact density evolution (DE) analysis for the binary erasure
channel (BEC). We propose two extensions of the original BCC ensemble to
improve its threshold and demonstrate that their BP thresholds approach the
maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) threshold of the uncoupled ensemble. A comparison of
the different ensembles shows that parallel concatenated ensembles can be
outperformed by both serially concatenated and BCC ensembles, although they
have the best BP thresholds in the uncoupled case.Comment: Invited paper, International Conference on Signal Processing and
Communications, SPCOM 2014, Bangalore, India, July 22-25, 201
