Design of systematic LDPC codes using density evolution based on tripartite graph

In previous works, density evolution schemes have been used to design an irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) code for the multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. However the code design based on the density evolution can be used only for simple code structure like LDPC codes and repeat-accumulate (RA) codes. Recently simple and accurate irregular LDPC code design method based on the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart was introduced for an AWGN channel. This code design scheme is much flexible, therefore it can be used for any kind of code structure like turbo codes. In this paper we design an irregular LDPC code for a MIMO system using the EXIT chart based scheme. The EXIT charts are used to obtain the optimal edge degree distribution of the irregular LDPC code combined with the MMSE-SIC MIMO detector. This scheme can be generalized for designing the optimal iterative MIMO detector combined with any kind of channel codes including turbo codes.

DOI: 10.1049/cp:20061337 ISBN: 0 86341 644 6 Location: Hangzhou, China Conference date: 6-9 Nov. 2006 Format: PDF The BER performance of presented quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is not good as that of randomly constructed LDPC codes, while the lack of structure of randomly constructed LDPC codes implies serious disadvantages in terms of storing and accessing a large parity-check matrix. To solve the problems, this paper proposes a design of good quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, the obtained algebraically structured codes have large minimum distances and good BER performance. The proposed design is based on index matrices, which determines the shifts of the circulant matrices of the sparse parity-check matrices. Compared with the presented design of QC LDPC codes, the designed QC LDPC codes are free from girth 4, sometimes free from girth 6, and have much larger minimum distances. Based on the algebraic code structure, the conditions of the girth and minimum distance of the codes are found. The BER performance of the designed QC LDPC block codes compares with that of randomly constructed LDPC codes for any block lengths. Better BER performance is obtained by increasing the circulant size of the base QC code. Simulations verify the construction of the QC LDPC codes to be valid. (4 pages) Inspec keywords: AWGN channels; error statistics; channel coding; algebraic codes; parity check codes; sparse matrices Subjects: Algebra; Other topics in statistics; Codes

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been widely considered as error-correcting codes for next generation communication systems. A good LDPC decoder design requires both implementation friendly LDPC codes and efficient decoder architectures. The quality of LDPC code is crucial in determining the coding gain and implementation complexity of LDPC hardware decoders. This paper presented a genetic algorithm (GA) based LDPC code search algorithm with hardware considerations. Regular quasi-cyclic LDPC codes are used due to its friendliness to hardware implementation. Our hardware architecture design schedules pipeline LDPC decoding operation to boost the hardware utilization efficiency (HUE) of LDPC decoder. A LDPC decoder with a block size of 12288 is implemented in FPGA to validate our code and architecture design.

Turbo codes are attractive compared with Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes for Forward Error Correction (FEC) applications mainly due to their superior performance, especially at low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) such as are common in Powerline channels. For example, IEEE 1901-FFT PHY used the Turbo coding scheme defined in the HomePlug AV standards. However, patent fees are usually required for each turbo-code enabled manufactured device. The objective of this paper is to examine whether unlicensed LDPC codes, with optimized choices of block lengths, could be a viable alternative for future Powerline Communications (PLC) applications. The paper shows that the performance of the LDPC codes can approximate that of the Turbo codes with higher block lengths, on channels with typical and realistic PLC characteristics. The paper also shows that the additional complexity associated with this increase in block length can be mitigated by the use of Quasi-Cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) codes.

Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes have capacity-approaching performance over several channels of interest. In practice, for good block-error rate performance, the girth of the Tanner graph of an LDPC code needs to be as high as possible. In theory, to show that block-error rate approaches zero for increasing block-lengths, the girth of the Tanner graph sequence needs to tend to infinity with block-length. To meet these requirements, we construct sequences of large-girth irregular LDPC codes for a given degree-distribution pair (DDP) by applying a general node splitting algorithm on large girth graphs. The obtained Tanner graph meets the required DDP up to a suitable approximation. By optimizing the node-splitting method and using suitable large-girth graphs, we show code constructions with smaller block length for the same girth, when compared to previous constructions. Similar gains in block length are observed in the construction of sequences of large-girth protograph LDPC codes. Simulations, over a binary erasure channel, confirm the gains in block-error rate obtained by the large girth construction.

Big data storage demands larger cluster. The increasing size of the cluster may lead to failures of larger number of nodes. To provide reliable big data storage, replications are not cost-effective and does not provide a robust solution to prevent data loss. Traditional erasure codes applied in the RAID system such as Reed-Solomon (R-S) based solutions have limitations in providing high reliability. This is because higher reliability requires erasure codes with larger size. The computational cost of the R-S codes increase quadratically with the number of failures the R-S codes can tolerate for the same redundancy rate. It has been shown that Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes have lower computational cost and repair network traffic compared with R-S based solutions. Unfortunately, there does not exist a construction method for LDPC codes with larger size to control the computational cost and repair traffic. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to construct a family of LDPC codes - expanCodes with expandable sizes. The proposed expanCodes allows the encoding and decoding complexity remain unchanged with the increase of the size of the LDPC codes. As a result, increased reliability can be achieved without additional computation and repair traffic. The proposed expanCodes is integrated with the Hadoop system. Simulations show that more than 29% decrease in terms of encoding and decoding latency compared with R-S based solutions.

In this paper, a random Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code is proposed for Noncontiguous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (NC-OFDM) Cognitive Radio (CR) systems. Unlike other encoding schemes which achieve a system code rate of only 1/4 when half of the subcarriers are active, the proposed scheme achieves a system code rate of 1/2. The LDPC code is used to enhance the data transmission rate. A new channel model comprised of a binary erasure channel concatenated with an uncorrelated fading channel and an AWGN channel is adopted for NC-OFDM CR systems. Moreover, the adopted channel model is employed with density evolution algorithm to obtain good degree distribution pairs for the LDPC code. Thereafter, a modified shortest-path algorithm is used to construct the parity-check matrix for the LDPC code. Simulation results show that the proposed LDPC code performs well in terms of both error rate and data transmission rate.

The application of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code in the anti-interference systems has drawn an increasing attention, due to its admiring performance which is very close to the theory limit. This paper focuses on a LDPC encoded slow frequency hopping (SFH) communication system with partial-band interference. Firstly, a modified soft- decision algorithm based on the utilization of interference information is proposed, and its performance is compared with some other soft-decision methods. Secondly, with numerical simulation, the influence of code rate, code length and the number of symbols per hops on the performance of the system with partial band noise interference is illustrated and examined in detail. Considering the great influence of hops per symbol on the performance, interleaver should be used and its influence on the performance is further examined by simulation. Finally, some constructive advises for the design of LDPC coded SFH system are given. Simulation results show that, with a reasonable design, the SFH system with LDPC code could achieve a desirable performance.

We propose a novel concatenated coding scheme combined Low Density Parity Check(LDPC) code and vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (VBLAST) code to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance for Free-space optical (FSO) communication links with On Off Keying(OOK) modulation. In the scheme, π-rotation encoding and belief-propagation (BP) decoding algorithm are employed in LDPC code, and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) soft-decision decoding algorithm is used for VBLAST code. Moreover, a joint iterative detection and decoding algorithm of VBLAST code and LDPC code is used to improve the overall link performance. At last, the BER of the proposed scheme over lognormal atmospheric turbulent fading channels is analyzed by using Monte Carlo method. The result shows that the BER of the proposed concatenated coding scheme is much improved than that only use VBLAST code scheme.

In this paper we propose an innovative channel coding scheme called 'Accumulate Repeat Accumulate codes' (ARA). This class of codes can be viewed as serial turbo-like codes, or as a subclass of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, thus belief propagation can be used for iterative decoding of ARA codes on a graph. The structure of encoder for this class can be viewed as precoded Repeat Accumulate (RA) code or as precoded Irregular Repeat Accumulate (IRA) code, where simply an accumulator is chosen as a precoder. Thus ARA codes have simple, and very fast encoder structure when they representing LDPC codes. Based on density evolution for LDPC codes through some examples for ARA codes, we show that for maximum variable node degree 5 a minimum bit SNR as low as 0.08 dB from channel capacity for rate 1/2 can be achieved as the block size goes to infinity. Thus based on fixed low maximum variable node degree, its threshold outperforms not only the RA and IRA codes but also the best known LDPC codes with the dame maximum node degree. Furthermore by puncturing the accumulators any desired high rate codes close to code rate 1 can be obtained with thresholds that stay close to the channel capacity thresholds uniformly. Iterative decoding simulation results are provided. The ARA codes also have projected graph or protograph representation that allows for high speed decoder implementation.

In mobile communications, the quality of signal is deteriorated by fading. The spatial diversity technique is used to reduce the degradation of the signal by fading. There are several techniques to realize the spatial diversity gain, such as Single- Input Multiple-Output (SIMO), Space-Time Block Code (STBC), and so on. The SIMO system realizes the receive diversity. The error correcting code can be combined with spatial diversity gain. Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes can achieve good performance approaching Shannon limit. In particular, an irregular LDPC code with optimum degree distribution achieves better performance than a regular LDPC code. The optimum degree distribution of the irregular LDPC code depends both on the channel and the system. In this paper, we derive the Eb/No thresholds of a regular LDPC codes and the irregular LDPC codes for SIMO systems with several diversity orders. The Eb/No threshold is the smallest Eb/No that the decoder can achieve the error free. We also derive the optimum degree distributions of the irregular LDPC codes for SIMO systems with several diversity orders. We show that with low diversity order, the optimum degree distributions of the irregular LDPC code depends on the diversity order largely, while with high diversity order, the optimum degree distribution depends both on the diversity order and the combining scheme largely. We also show that comparing the optimum degree distributions for MRC and STBC, when the diversity orders are the same, the optimum degree distributions are also the same.

Low-density Parity check codes (LDPC) are gaining interest for high data rate application in both terrestrial and spatial communications which requires low bit error rate. This paper proposes an algorithm through which the best parity check matrix is obtained for irregular low density parity check codes, which reduces the Bit Error Rate ,Frame Error Rate and computational complexity. Tanner graph also called a bipartite graph format in an Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) code design contains many short cycles; it will produce a computational complexity in a code design process and it degrades the code performance. To overcome this effect, we proposed an new algorithm which obtains a best final parity check matrix. Throughout the paper we will give the detailed description of an efficient algorithm proposed. The complexity is studied graphically and analytically. Using proposed algorithm, cycles of length four observed in corresponding matrix are removed. Each matrix is evaluated over a noisy Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. Bit Error rate and Frame error rate is calculated. The results are compared with randomly generated best parity check matrix. Simulation results shows that proposed method successfully overcomes the computational complexity and meets the near Shannon limit.

Multi-rate low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are widely used in satellite communication (SatCom) systems due to their outstanding performance and adaptable code rates. However, their hardware decoder implementations typically require high hardware resources and many decoding iterations, which pose challenges for high-throughput applications in resource-constrained, high-data-rate SatCom scenarios. To this end, the design of throughput-optimized multi-rate LDPC codes is investigated, aiming to tackle the decoder implementation problem from the perspective of practical code design. Specifically, a multi-rate weighted normalized throughput metric is introduced, which considers two key factors, i.e., the number of non-zero elements in the parity-check matrix and the required decoding iterations. Then, the throughput-optimized multi-rate code design problem is formulated to maximize the proposed metric under given decoding threshold constraints, which is later solved using a protomatrix search method based on the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. Finally, three multi-rate LDPC codes are optimized for scenes with different code rate usage frequencies. Their performance is extensively evaluated both theoretically and numerically. Results demonstrate that the proposed codes outperform other similar LDPC codes in the literature, showing a throughput increase of 20% to 30% under the same hardware resource consumption.

It is known that the error rate can be used as a measure of reliability and security over the wire-tap channel when practical, finite length codes are used for transmission, and the security gap is an error rate based metric able to jointly treat these two aspects. In this paper, we consider several low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded transmissions, which represent the state of the art for transmissions over the wire-tap channel and we assess and compare their security gap performance. We consider two kinds of wire-tap channels: the flat and the fast fading wire-tap channels with additive white Gaussian noise. As a reference, we use the progressive edge growth (PEG) algorithm for the design of unstructured LDPC codes and compare its performance with that of four approaches for designing structured LDPC codes. We analyze both systematic and non-systematic transmissions and show that some structured code design techniques are able to achieve comparable or even better performance than the PEG algorithm over the considered channels, while taking advantage of their simpler encoding and decoding procedures.

This letter gives a random construction for Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, which uses an iterative algorithm to avoid short cycles in the Tanner graph. The construction method has great flexible choice in LDPC code’s parameters including codelength, code rate, the least girth of the graph, the weight of column and row in the parity check matrix. The method can be applied to the irregular LDPC codes and strict regular LDPC codes. Systemic codes have many applications in digital communication, so this letter proposes a construction of the generator matrix of systemic LDPC codes from the parity check matrix. Simulations show that the method performs well with iterative decoding.