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

We present a new class of iteratively decodable turbo-like codes, called braided convolutional codes. Constructions and encoding procedures for tightly and sparsely braided convolutional codes are introduced. Sparsely braided codes exhibit 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.