A new approach for the approximation of the channel log-likelihood ratio (LLR) for wireless channels based on Taylor series is proposed. The approximation is applied to the uncorrelated flat Rayleigh fading channel with unknown channel state informat
ion at the receiver. It is shown that the proposed approximation greatly simplifies the calculation of channel LLRs, and yet provides results almost identical to those based on the exact calculation of channel LLRs. The results are obtained in the context of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) schemes with low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, and include threshold calculations and error rate performance of finite-length codes. Compared to the existing approximations, the proposed method is either significantly less complex, or considerably more accurate.
We propose a technique to design finite-length irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with good performance in both the waterfall and the error floor region. The design proce
ss starts from a protograph which embodies a desirable degree distribution. This protograph is then lifted cyclically to a certain block length of interest. The lift is designed carefully to satisfy a certain approximate cycle extrinsic message degree (ACE) spectrum. The target ACE spectrum is one with extremal properties, implying a good error floor performance for the designed code. The proposed construction results in quasi-cyclic codes which are attractive in practice due to simple encoder and decoder implementation. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed construction in comparison with similar existing constructions.
Cyclic liftings are proposed to lower the error floor of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The liftings are designed to eliminate dominant trapping sets of the base code by removing the short cycles which form the trapping sets. We derive a nece
ssary and sufficient condition for the cyclic permutations assigned to the edges of a cycle $c$ of length $ell(c)$ in the base graph such that the inverse image of $c$ in the lifted graph consists of only cycles of length strictly larger than $ell(c)$. The proposed method is universal in the sense that it can be applied to any LDPC code over any channel and for any iterative decoding algorithm. It also preserves important properties of the base code such as degree distributions, encoder and decoder structure, and in some cases, the code rate. The proposed method is applied to both structured and random codes over the binary symmetric channel (BSC). The error floor improves consistently by increasing the lifting degree, and the results show significant improvements in the error floor compared to the base code, a random code of the same degree distribution and block length, and a random lifting of the same degree. Similar improvements are also observed when the codes designed for the BSC are applied to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.
