A novel fast LDPC decoder using APP-based dynamic scheduling scheme

Abstract

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are favorable in modern telecommunication technologies due to its superior error-correction capability especially when the codeword length is large. The commonly-used LDPC decoders are based on the belief-propagation (BP) algorithms. It is well known that the layered (serial) belief-propagation (LBP) decoding algorithms can reduce the number of iterations by half in comparison with the flooding (parallel) BP decoding algorithms. Further reduction in total number of iterations can be achieved by using the informed dynamic scheduling techniques, such as residual BP (RBP) and node-wise residual BP (NWRBP) methods. However, the incurred additional computation of residuals is far from trivial. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient dynamic scheduling scheme, called a posteriori probability RBP (APPRBP) algorithm, which offers more flexibility to leverage the performance-complexity trade-off using a threshold parameter. The simulation results demonstrate that the average iteration numbers for our proposed APPRBP algorithm can be remarkably reduced especially in the low E-b/N-0 (signal-energy-per-information-bit to noise-power-spectral-density ratio) conditions while the bit-error rate (BER) performance is subject to slight degradation.