No Arabic abstract
Spatially coupled codes have been shown to universally achieve the capacity for a large class of channels. Many variants of such codes have been introduced to date. We discuss a further such variant that is particularly simple and is determined by a very small number of parameters. More precisely, we consider time-invariant low-density convolutional codes with very large constraint lengths. We show via simulations that, despite their extreme simplicity, such codes still show the threshold saturation behavior known from the spatially coupled codes discussed in the literature. Further, we show how the size of the typical minimum stopping set is related to basic parameters of the code. Due to their simplicity and good performance, these codes might be attractive from an implementation perspective.
Braided convolutional codes (BCCs) are a class of spatially coupled turbo-like codes that can be described by a $(2,3)$-regular compact graph. In this paper, we introduce a family of $(d_v,d_c)$-regular GLDPC codes with convolutional code constraints (CC-GLDPC codes), which form an extension of classical BCCs to arbitrary regular graphs. In order to characterize the performance in the waterfall and error floor regions, we perform an analysis of the density evolution thresholds as well as the finite-length ensemble weight enumerators and minimum distances of the ensembles. In particular, we consider various ensembles of overall rate $R=1/3$ and $R=1/2$ and study the trade-off between variable node degree and strength of the component codes. We also compare the results to corresponding classical LDPC codes with equal degrees and rates. It is observed that for the considered LDPC codes with variable node degree $d_v>2$, we can find a CC-GLDPC code with smaller $d_v$ that offers similar or better performance in terms of BP and MAP thresholds at the expense of a negligible loss in the minimum distance.
The recent development of deep learning methods provides a new approach to optimize the belief propagation (BP) decoding of linear codes. However, the limitation of existing works is that the scale of neural networks increases rapidly with the codelength, thus they can only support short to moderate codelengths. From the point view of practicality, we propose a high-performance neural min-sum (MS) decoding method that makes full use of the lifting structure of protograph low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. By this means, the size of the parameter array of each layer in the neural decoder only equals the number of edge-types for arbitrary codelengths. In particular, for protograph LDPC codes, the proposed neural MS decoder is constructed in a special way such that identical parameters are shared by a bundle of edges derived from the same edge-type. To reduce the complexity and overcome the vanishing gradient problem in training the proposed neural MS decoder, an iteration-by-iteration (i.e., layer-by-layer in neural networks) greedy training method is proposed. With this, the proposed neural MS decoder tends to be optimized with faster convergence, which is aligned with the early termination mechanism widely used in practice. To further enhance the generalization ability of the proposed neural MS decoder, a codelength/rate compatible training method is proposed, which randomly selects samples from a set of codes lifted from the same base code. As a theoretical performance evaluation tool, a trajectory-based extrinsic information transfer (T-EXIT) chart is developed for various decoders. Both T-EXIT and simulation results show that the optimized MS decoding can provide faster convergence and up to 1dB gain compared with the plain MS decoding and its variants with only slightly increased complexity. In addition, it can even outperform the sum-product algorithm for some short codes.
Min-Sum decoding is widely used for decoding LDPC codes in many modern digital video broadcasting decoding due to its relative low complexity and robustness against quantization error. However, the suboptimal performance of the Min-Sum affects the integrated performance of wireless receivers. In this paper, we present the idea of adapting the scaling factor of the Min-Sum decoder with iterations through a simple approximation. For the ease of implementation the scaling factor can be changed in a staircase fashion. The stair step is designed to optimize the decoder performance and the required storage for its different values. The variable scaling factor proposed algorithm produces a non-trivial improvement of the performance of the Min-Sum decoding as verified by simulation results.
This paper considers density evolution for lowdensity parity-check (LDPC) and multi-edge type low-density parity-check (MET-LDPC) codes over the binary input additive white Gaussian noise channel. We first analyze three singleparameter Gaussian approximations for density evolution and discuss their accuracy under several conditions, namely at low rates, with punctured and degree-one variable nodes. We observe that the assumption of symmetric Gaussian distribution for the density-evolution messages is not accurate in the early decoding iterations, particularly at low rates and with punctured variable nodes. Thus single-parameter Gaussian approximation methods produce very poor results in these cases. Based on these observations, we then introduce a new density evolution approximation algorithm for LDPC and MET-LDPC codes. Our method is a combination of full density evolution and a single-parameter Gaussian approximation, where we assume a symmetric Gaussian distribution only after density-evolution messages closely follow a symmetric Gaussian distribution. Our method significantly improves the accuracy of the code threshold estimation. Additionally, the proposed method significantly reduces the computational time of evaluating the code threshold compared to full density evolution thereby making it more suitable for code design.
In this paper, we propose a novel low complexity scaling strategy of min-sum decoding algorithm for irregular LDPC codes. In the proposed method, we generalize our previously proposed simplified Variable Scaled Min-Sum (SVS-min-sum) by replacing the sub-optimal starting value and heuristic update for the scaling factor sequence by optimized values. Density evolution and Nelder-Mead optimization are used offline, prior to the decoding, to obtain the optimal starting point and per iteration updating step size for the scaling factor sequence of the proposed scaling strategy. The optimization of these parameters proves to be of noticeable positive impact on the decoding performance. We used different DVB-T2 LDPC codes in our simulation. Simulation results show the superior performance (in both WER and latency) of the proposed algorithm to other Min-Sum based algorithms. In addition to that, generalized SVS-min-sum algorithm has very close performance to LLR-SPA with much lower complexity.