  Braided convolutional codes (BCCs) are a class of spatially coupled
turbo-like codes (SC-TCs) with excellent belief propagation (BP) thresholds. In
this paper, we analyze the performance of BCCs in the finite block-length
regime. We derive the average weight enumerator function (WEF) and compute the
union bound on the performance for the uncoupled BCC ensemble. Our results
suggest that the union bound is affected by poor distance properties of a small
fraction of codes. By computing the union bound for the expurgated ensemble, we
show that the floor improves substantially and very low error rates can be
achieved for moderate permutation sizes. Based on the WEF, we also obtain a
bound on the minimum distance which indicates that it grows linearly with the
permutation size. Finally, we show that the estimated error floor for the
uncoupled BCC ensemble is also valid for the coupled ensemble by proving that
the minimum distance of the coupled ensemble is lower bounded by the minimum
distance of the uncoupled ensemble.
