Improve the Usability of Polar Codes: Code Construction, Performance Enhancement and Configurable Hardware

Error-correcting codes (ECC) have been widely used for forward error correction (FEC) in modern communication systems to dramatically reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) needed to achieve a given bit error rate (BER). Newly invented polar codes have attracted much interest because of their capacity-achieving potential, efficient encoder and decoder implementation, and flexible architecture design space.This dissertation is aimed at improving the usability of polar codes by providing a practical code design method, new approaches to improve the performance of polar code, and a configurable hardware design that adapts to various specifications. State-of-the-art polar codes are used to achieve extremely low error rates. In this work, high-performance FPGA is used in prototyping polar decoders to catch rare-case errors for error-correcting performance verification and error analysis. To discover the polarization characteristics and error patterns of polar codes, an FPGA emulation platform for belief-propagation (BP) decoding is built by a semi-automated construction flow. The FPGA-based emulation achieves significant speedup in large-scale experiments involving trillions of data frames. The platform is a key enabler of this work. The frozen set selection of polar codes, known as bit selection, is critical to the error-correcting performance of polar codes. A simulation-based in-order bit selection method is developed to evaluate the error rate of each bit using Monte Carlo simulations. The frozen set is selected based on the bit reliability ranking. The resulting code construction exhibits up to 1 dB coding gain with respect to the conventional bit selection. To further improve the coding gain of BP decoder for low-error-rate applications, the decoding error mechanisms are studied and analyzed, and the errors are classified based on their distinct signatures. Error detection is enabled by low-cost CRC concatenation, and post-processing algorithms targeting at each type of the error is designed to mitigate the vast majority of the decoding errors. The post-processor incurs only a small implementation overhead, but it provides more than an order of magnitude improvement of the error-correcting performance. The regularity of the BP decoder structure offers many hardware architecture choices. Silicon area, power consumption, throughput and latency can be traded to reach the optimal design points for practical use cases. A comprehensive design space exploration reveals several practical architectures at different design points. The scalability of each architecture is also evaluated based on the implementation candidates. For dynamic communication channels, such as wireless channels in the upcoming 5G applications, multiple codes of different lengths and code rates are needed to t varying channel conditions. To minimize implementation cost, a universal decoder architecture is proposed to support multiple codes through hardware reuse. A 40nm length- and rate-configurable polar decoder ASIC is demonstrated to fit various communication environments and service requirements.PHDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140817/1/shuangsh_1.pd

Conflict Resolution by Matrix Reordering for DVB-T2 LDPC Decoders

International audienceLayered decoding is known to provide efficient and high-throughput implementation of LDPC decoders. However, the implementation of the layered architecture is not always straightforward because of the memory access conflicts in the a-posteriori information memory. In this paper, we focus our attention on a particular type of conflict introduced by the existence of multiple diagonal matrices in the DVB-T2 parity check matrix structure. We illustrate how the reordering of the matrix reduces the number of conflicts, at the cost of limiting the level of parallelism. We then propose a parity extending process to solve the remaining conflicts. Fixed point simulation results show coherent performance without modifying the layered architecture

Decisive analysis of current state of the art in congestion aware and control routing models in ad hoc networks

An important aspect that portrays a crucial position in the ad hoc network routing is congestion. Almost every research analysis is en-route in adapting this key factor in addressing congestion. This problem cannot be totally addressed by the regular TCP protocol based networks, keeping in view the special assets which include multi hop sharing etc, which is difficult to ascertain in ad hoc networks. Many attempts have been made and are in progress by researchers to provide unique solutions to the above mentioned problems. This paper projects a vital study on jamming aware and different routing standards that have been dealt with in recent times

Design of a GF(64)-LDPC Decoder Based on the EMS Algorithm

International audienceThis paper presents the architecture, performance and implementation results of a serial GF(64)-LDPC decoder based on a reduced-complexity version of the Extended Min-Sum algorithm. The main contributions of this work correspond to the variable node processing, the codeword decision and the elementary check node processing. Post-synthesis area results show that the decoder area is less than 20% of a Virtex 4 FPGA for a decoding throughput of 2.95 Mbps. The implemented decoder presents performance at less than 0.7 dB from the Belief Propagation algorithm for different code lengths and rates. Moreover, the proposed architecture can be easily adapted to decode very high Galois Field orders, such as GF(4096) or higher, by slightly modifying a marginal part of the design

High-Performance NB-LDPC Decoder With Reduction of Message Exchange

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper presents a novel algorithm based on trellis min-max for decoding non-binary low-density parity-check (NB-LDPC) codes. This decoder reduces the number of messages exchanged between check node and variable node processors, which decreases the storage resources and the wiring congestion and, thus, increases the throughput of the decoder. Our frame error rate performance simulations show that the proposed algorithm has a negligible performance loss for high-rate codes with GF(16) and GF(32), and a performance loss smaller than 0.07 dB for high-rate codes over GF(64). In addition, a layered decoder architecture is presented and implemented on a 90-nm CMOS process for the following high-rate NB-LDPC codes: (2304, 2048) over GF(16), (837, 726) over GF(32), and (1536, 1344) over GF(64). In all cases, the achieved throughput is higher than 1 Gb/s.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion under Grant TEC2011-27916 and Grant TEC2012-38558-C02-02, and in part by Generalitat Valenciana under Grant GV/2014/011.Lacruz, JO.; García Herrero, FM.; Canet Subiela, MJ.; Valls Coquillat, J. (2016). High-Performance NB-LDPC Decoder With Reduction of Message Exchange. IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems. 24(5):1950-1961. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVLSI.2015.2493041S1950196124

Linear-time encoding and decoding of low-density parity-check codes

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes had a renaissance when they were rediscovered in the 1990’s. Since then LDPC codes have been an important part of the field of error-correcting codes, and have been shown to be able to approach the Shannon capacity, the limit at which we can reliably transmit information over noisy channels. Following this, many modern communications standards have adopted LDPC codes. Error-correction is equally important in protecting data from corruption on a hard-drive as it is in deep-space communications. It is most commonly used for example for reliable wireless transmission of data to mobile devices. For practical purposes, both encoding and decoding need to be of low complexity to achieve high throughput and low power consumption. This thesis provides a literature review of the current state-of-the-art in encoding and decoding of LDPC codes. Message- passing decoders are still capable of achieving the best error-correcting performance, while more recently considered bit-flipping decoders are providing a low-complexity alternative, albeit with some loss in error-correcting performance. An implementation of a low-complexity stochastic bit-flipping decoder is also presented. It is implemented for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in a parallel fashion, providing a peak throughput of 1.2 Gb/s, which is significantly higher than previous decoder implementations on GPUs. The error-correcting performance of a range of decoders has also been tested, showing that the stochastic bit-flipping decoder provides relatively good error-correcting performance with low complexity. Finally, a brief comparison of encoding complexities for two code ensembles is also presented