Feed-Forward Staircase Codes

Abstract: We propose two variants of staircase codes that resolve the issue of parity-propagation in their encoding process. The proposed codes provide a systematic way of terminating a staircase code after an arbitrary number of blocks. The class of feed-forward staircase codes are introduced, which uses a self-protection technique to avoid parity-propagation. We also introduce the class of partial feed-forward staircase codes, which allows parity-propagation to occur over a given number of blocks. By amortizing the complexity of self-protection over several standard staircase blocks, the encoding complexity of these codes is made comparable to staircase codes. Partial feed-forward staircase codes have the same error-floor as staircase codes. Simulations confirm that the performance of the proposed codes in both the waterfall and error-floor regions is similar to the original staircase codes. The proposed codes help extend the domain of application of staircase codes to systems in which parity-propagation is undesirable or termination is necessary.