11 research outputs found
Hierarchical and High-Girth QC LDPC Codes
We present a general approach to designing capacity-approaching high-girth
low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes that are friendly to hardware
implementation. Our methodology starts by defining a new class of
"hierarchical" quasi-cyclic (HQC) LDPC codes that generalizes the structure of
quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes. Whereas the parity check matrices of QC LDPC
codes are composed of circulant sub-matrices, those of HQC LDPC codes are
composed of a hierarchy of circulant sub-matrices that are in turn constructed
from circulant sub-matrices, and so on, through some number of levels. We show
how to map any class of codes defined using a protograph into a family of HQC
LDPC codes. Next, we present a girth-maximizing algorithm that optimizes the
degrees of freedom within the family of codes to yield a high-girth HQC LDPC
code. Finally, we discuss how certain characteristics of a code protograph will
lead to inevitable short cycles, and show that these short cycles can be
eliminated using a "squashing" procedure that results in a high-girth QC LDPC
code, although not a hierarchical one. We illustrate our approach with designed
examples of girth-10 QC LDPC codes obtained from protographs of one-sided
spatially-coupled codes.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information THeor
Design and Analysis of Time-Invariant SC-LDPC Convolutional Codes With Small Constraint Length
In this paper, we deal with time-invariant spatially coupled low-density
parity-check convolutional codes (SC-LDPC-CCs). Classic design approaches
usually start from quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) block codes
and exploit suitable unwrapping procedures to obtain SC-LDPC-CCs. We show that
the direct design of the SC-LDPC-CCs syndrome former matrix or, equivalently,
the symbolic parity-check matrix, leads to codes with smaller syndrome former
constraint lengths with respect to the best solutions available in the
literature. We provide theoretical lower bounds on the syndrome former
constraint length for the most relevant families of SC-LDPC-CCs, under
constraints on the minimum length of cycles in their Tanner graphs. We also
propose new code design techniques that approach or achieve such theoretical
limits.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on
Communication
An Efficient Algorithm for Counting Cycles in QC and APM LDPC Codes
In this paper, a new method is given for counting cycles in the Tanner graph
of a (Type-I) quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) code which the
complexity mainly is dependent on the base matrix, independent from the
CPM-size of the constructed code. Interestingly, for large CPM-sizes, in
comparison of the existing methods, this algorithm is the first approach which
efficiently counts the cycles in the Tanner graphs of QC-LDPC codes. In fact,
the algorithm recursively counts the cycles in the parity-check matrix
column-by-column by finding all non-isomorph tailless backtrackless closed
(TBC) walks in the base graph and enumerating theoretically their corresponding
cycles in the same equivalent class. Moreover, this approach can be modified in
few steps to find the cycle distributions of a class of LDPC codes based on
Affine permutation matrices (APM-LDPC codes). Interestingly, unlike the
existing methods which count the cycles up to , where is the girth,
the proposed algorithm can be used to enumerate the cycles of arbitrary length
in the Tanner graph. Moreover, the proposed cycle searching algorithm improves
upon various previously known methods, in terms of computational complexity and
memory requirements.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure
Decomposition Methods for Large Scale LP Decoding
When binary linear error-correcting codes are used over symmetric channels, a
relaxed version of the maximum likelihood decoding problem can be stated as a
linear program (LP). This LP decoder can be used to decode error-correcting
codes at bit-error-rates comparable to state-of-the-art belief propagation (BP)
decoders, but with significantly stronger theoretical guarantees. However, LP
decoding when implemented with standard LP solvers does not easily scale to the
block lengths of modern error correcting codes. In this paper we draw on
decomposition methods from optimization theory, specifically the Alternating
Directions Method of Multipliers (ADMM), to develop efficient distributed
algorithms for LP decoding.
The key enabling technical result is a "two-slice" characterization of the
geometry of the parity polytope, which is the convex hull of all codewords of a
single parity check code. This new characterization simplifies the
representation of points in the polytope. Using this simplification, we develop
an efficient algorithm for Euclidean norm projection onto the parity polytope.
This projection is required by ADMM and allows us to use LP decoding, with all
its theoretical guarantees, to decode large-scale error correcting codes
efficiently.
We present numerical results for LDPC codes of lengths more than 1000. The
waterfall region of LP decoding is seen to initiate at a slightly higher
signal-to-noise ratio than for sum-product BP, however an error floor is not
observed for LP decoding, which is not the case for BP. Our implementation of
LP decoding using ADMM executes as fast as our baseline sum-product BP decoder,
is fully parallelizable, and can be seen to implement a type of message-passing
with a particularly simple schedule.Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures. An early version of this work appeared at the
49th Annual Allerton Conference, September 2011. This version to appear in
IEEE Transactions on Information Theor