Spatially Coupled Repeat-Accumulate Codes

In this paper we propose a new class of spatially coupled codes based on repeat-accumulate protographs. We show that spatially coupled repeat-accumulate codes have several advantages over spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes including simpler encoders and slightly higher code rates than spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes with similar thresholds and decoding complexity (as measured by the Tanner graph edge density).