Mixed Block Markov Superposition Transmission Codes

Abstract

Block Markov superposition transmission (BMST) codes provide a flexible framework for constructing codes with near-capacity performance and low-complexity sliding-window decoding. However, existing BMST variants show contrasting performance limitations: recursive BMST (rBMST) codes suffer from error propagation but avoid high error floors, whereas non-recursive BMST codes exhibit the opposite behavior. Motivated by these complementary characteristics, we combine recursive and non-recursive components through parallel and serial concatenation, yielding mixed BMST (mBMST) codes. The proposed framework subsumes existing BMST variants and enables new BMST structures. Simulations show that these structures improve FER and BER performance with lower memory requirements than rBMST.