Braided Convolutional Codes: A New Class of Turbo-Like Codes

Abstract—We present a new class of iteratively decodable turbo-like codes, called braided convolutional codes. Construc-tions and encoding procedures for tightly and sparsely braided convolutional codes are introduced. Sparsely braided codes ex-hibit good convergence behavior with iterative decoding, and a statistical analysis using Markov permutors shows that the free distance of these codes grows linearly with constraint length, i.e., they are asymptotically good. Index Terms—braided convolutional codes, turbo-like codes, codes on graphs, iterative decoding, convolutional permutor, free distance. I