  In many practical communication systems, one binary encoder/decoder pair is
used to communicate over a set of parallel channels. Examples of this setup
include multi-carrier transmission, rate-compatible puncturing of turbo-like
codes, and bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM). A bit mapper is commonly
employed to determine how the coded bits are allocated to the channels. In this
paper, we study spatially coupled low-density parity check codes over parallel
channels and optimize the bit mapper using BICM as the driving example. For
simplicity, the parallel bit channels that arise in BICM are replaced by
independent binary erasure channels (BECs). For two parallel BECs modeled
according to a 4-PAM constellation labeled by the binary reflected Gray code,
the optimization results show that the decoding threshold can be improved over
a uniform random bit mapper, or, alternatively, the spatial chain length of the
code can be reduced for a given gap to capacity. It is also shown that for
rate-loss free, circular (tail-biting) ensembles, a decoding wave effect can be
initiated using only an optimized bit mapper.
