  We consider a windowed decoding scheme for LDPC convolutional codes that is
based on the belief-propagation (BP) algorithm. We discuss the advantages of
this decoding scheme and identify certain characteristics of LDPC convolutional
code ensembles that exhibit good performance with the windowed decoder. We will
consider the performance of these ensembles and codes over erasure channels
with and without memory. We show that the structure of LDPC convolutional code
ensembles is suitable to obtain performance close to the theoretical limits
over the memoryless erasure channel, both for the BP decoder and windowed
decoding. However, the same structure imposes limitations on the performance
over erasure channels with memory.
