  For a given family of spatially coupled codes, we prove that the LP threshold
on the BSC of the graph cover ensemble is the same as the LP threshold on the
BSC of the derived spatially coupled ensemble. This result is in contrast with
the fact that the BP threshold of the derived spatially coupled ensemble is
believed to be larger than the BP threshold of the graph cover ensemble as
noted by the work of Kudekar et al. (2011, 2012). To prove this, we establish
some properties related to the dual witness for LP decoding which was
introduced by Feldman et al. (2007) and simplified by Daskalakis et al. (2008).
More precisely, we prove that the existence of a dual witness which was
previously known to be sufficient for LP decoding success is also necessary and
is equivalent to the existence of certain acyclic hyperflows. We also derive a
sublinear (in the block length) upper bound on the weight of any edge in such
hyperflows, both for regular LPDC codes and for spatially coupled codes and we
prove that the bound is asymptotically tight for regular LDPC codes. Moreover,
we show how to trade crossover probability for "LP excess" on all the variable
nodes, for any binary linear code.
