Design and Performance of Rate-compatible Non-Binary LDPC Convolutional Codes

In this paper, we present a construction method of non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes. Our construction method is an extension of Felstroem and Zigangirov construction for non-binary LDPC convolutional codes. The rate-compatibility of the non-binary convolutional code is also discussed. The proposed rate-compatible code is designed from one single mother (2,4)-regular non-binary LDPC convolutional code of rate 1/2. Higher-rate codes are produced by puncturing the mother code and lower-rate codes are produced by multiplicatively repeating the mother code. Simulation results show that non-binary LDPC convolutional codes of rate 1/2 outperform state-of-the-art binary LDPC convolutional codes with comparable constraint bit length. Also the derived low-rate and high-rate non-binary LDPC convolutional codes exhibit good decoding performance without loss of large gap to the Shannon limits.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to IEICE transactio

Threshold Analysis of Non-Binary Spatially-Coupled LDPC Codes with Windowed Decoding

In this paper we study the iterative decoding threshold performance of non-binary spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (NB-SC-LDPC) code ensembles for both the binary erasure channel (BEC) and the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel (BIAWGNC), with particular emphasis on windowed decoding (WD). We consider both (2,4)-regular and (3,6)-regular NB-SC-LDPC code ensembles constructed using protographs and compute their thresholds using protograph versions of NB density evolution and NB extrinsic information transfer analysis. For these code ensembles, we show that WD of NB-SC-LDPC codes, which provides a significant decrease in latency and complexity compared to decoding across the entire parity-check matrix, results in a negligible decrease in the near-capacity performance for a sufficiently large window size W on both the BEC and the BIAWGNC. Also, we show that NB-SC-LDPC code ensembles exhibit gains in the WD threshold compared to the corresponding block code ensembles decoded across the entire parity-check matrix, and that the gains increase as the finite field size q increases. Moreover, from the viewpoint of decoding complexity, we see that (3,6)-regular NB-SC-LDPC codes are particularly attractive due to the fact that they achieve near-capacity thresholds even for small q and W.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures; submitted to 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theor

Nonbinary Spatially-Coupled LDPC Codes on the Binary Erasure Channel

We analyze the asymptotic performance of nonbinary spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes built on the general linear group, when the transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. We propose an efficient method to derive an upper bound to the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) threshold for nonbinary LDPC codes, and observe that the MAP performance of regular LDPC codes improves with the alphabet size. We then consider nonbinary SC-LDPC codes. We show that the same threshold saturation effect experienced by binary SC-LDPC codes occurs for the nonbinary codes, hence we conjecture that the BP threshold for large termination length approaches the MAP threshold of the underlying regular ensemble.Comment: Submitted to IEEE International Conference on Communications 201

Concatenated Turbo/LDPC codes for deep space communications: performance and implementation

Deep space communications require error correction codes able to reach extremely low bit-error-rates, possibly with a steep waterfall region and without error floor. Several schemes have been proposed in the literature to achieve these goals. Most of them rely on the concatenation of different codes that leads to high hardware implementation complexity and poor resource sharing. This work proposes a scheme based on the concatenation of non-custom LDPC and turbo codes that achieves excellent error correction performance. Moreover, since both LDPC and turbo codes can be decoded with the BCJR algorithm, our preliminary results show that an efficient hardware architecture with high resource reuse can be designe

A New Class of Multiple-rate Codes Based on Block Markov Superposition Transmission

Hadamard transform~(HT) as over the binary field provides a natural way to implement multiple-rate codes~(referred to as {\em HT-coset codes}), where the code length $N=2^p$ is fixed but the code dimension $K$ can be varied from $1$ to $N-1$ by adjusting the set of frozen bits. The HT-coset codes, including Reed-Muller~(RM) codes and polar codes as typical examples, can share a pair of encoder and decoder with implementation complexity of order $O(N \log N)$. However, to guarantee that all codes with designated rates perform well, HT-coset coding usually requires a sufficiently large code length, which in turn causes difficulties in the determination of which bits are better for being frozen. In this paper, we propose to transmit short HT-coset codes in the so-called block Markov superposition transmission~(BMST) manner. At the transmitter, signals are spatially coupled via superposition, resulting in long codes. At the receiver, these coupled signals are recovered by a sliding-window iterative soft successive cancellation decoding algorithm. Most importantly, the performance around or below the bit-error-rate~(BER) of $10^{-5}$ can be predicted by a simple genie-aided lower bound. Both these bounds and simulation results show that the BMST of short HT-coset codes performs well~(within one dB away from the corresponding Shannon limits) in a wide range of code rates

Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes Constructed from Protographs

In this paper, we construct protograph-based spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes by coupling together a series of L disjoint, or uncoupled, LDPC code Tanner graphs into a single coupled chain. By varying L, we obtain a flexible family of code ensembles with varying rates and frame lengths that can share the same encoding and decoding architecture for arbitrary L. We demonstrate that the resulting codes combine the best features of optimized irregular and regular codes in one design: capacity approaching iterative belief propagation (BP) decoding thresholds and linear growth of minimum distance with block length. In particular, we show that, for sufficiently large L, the BP thresholds on both the binary erasure channel (BEC) and the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGNC) saturate to a particular value significantly better than the BP decoding threshold and numerically indistinguishable from the optimal maximum a-posteriori (MAP) decoding threshold of the uncoupled LDPC code. When all variable nodes in the coupled chain have degree greater than two, asymptotically the error probability converges at least doubly exponentially with decoding iterations and we obtain sequences of asymptotically good LDPC codes with fast convergence rates and BP thresholds close to the Shannon limit. Further, the gap to capacity decreases as the density of the graph increases, opening up a new way to construct capacity achieving codes on memoryless binary-input symmetric-output (MBS) channels with low-complexity BP decoding.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor