  This paper investigates the design of self-connected spatially coupled
low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes. First, a termination method is
proposed to reduce rate loss. Particularly, a single-side open SC-LDPC ensemble
is introduced, which halves the rate loss of a conventional terminated SC-LDPC
by reducing the number of check nodes. We further propose a self-connection
method that allows reliable information to propagate from several directions to
improve the decoding threshold. We demonstrate that the proposed ensembles not
only achieve a better trade-off between rate loss and gap to capacity than
several existing protograph SC-LDPC codes with short chain lengths but also
exhibit threshold saturation behavior. Finite blocklength error performance is
provided to exemplify the superiority of the proposed codes over conventional
protograph SC-LDPC codes.
