Blind LDPC encoder identification

Nowadays, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) techniques can facilitate flexible strategies subject to dynamic channel quality. The AMC transceivers select the most suitable coding and modulation mechanisms subject to the acquired channel information. Meanwhile, a control channel or a preamble is usually required to synchronously coordinate such changes between transmitters and receivers. On the other hand, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes become more and more popular in recent years due to their promising capacity-approaching property. The broad range of variations in code rates and codeword lengths for LDPC codes makes them ideal candidates for future AMC transceivers. The blind encoder identification problem emerges when the underlying control channel is absent or the preamble is not allowed in AMC systems. It would be quite intriguing for one to build a blind encoder identification technique without spectrum-efficiency sacrifice. Therefore, in this thesis, we investigate blind LDPC encoder identification for AMC systems. Specifically, we would like to tackle the blind identification of binary LDPC codes (encoders) for binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signals and nonbinary LDPC codes for quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM) signals. We propose a novel blind identification system which consists of three major components, namely expectation-maximization (EM) estimator for unknown parameters (signal amplitude, noise variance, and phase offset), log-likelihood ratio (LLR) estimator for syndrome a posteriori probabilities, and maximum average-LLR detector. Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrate that our proposed blind LDPC encoder identification scheme is very promising over different signal-to-noise ratio conditions

New Identification and Decoding Techniques for Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

Error-correction coding schemes are indispensable for high-capacity high data-rate communication systems nowadays. Among various channel coding schemes, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes introduced by pioneer Robert G. Gallager are prominent due to the capacity-approaching and superior error-correcting properties. There is no hard constraint on the code rate of LDPC codes. Consequently, it is ideal to incorporate LDPC codes with various code rate and codeword length in the adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) systems which change the encoder and the modulator adaptively to improve the system throughput. In conventional AMC systems, a dedicated control channel is assigned to coordinate the encoder/decoder changes. A questions then rises: if the AMC system still works when such a control channel is absent. This work gives positive answer to this question by investigating various scenarios consisting of different modulation schemes, such as quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM), frequency-shift keying (FSK), and different channels, such as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels and fading channels. On the other hand, LDPC decoding is usually carried out by iterative belief-propagation (BP) algorithms. As LDPC codes become prevalent in advanced communication and storage systems, low-complexity LDPC decoding algorithms are favored in practical applications. In the conventional BP decoding algorithm, the stopping criterion is to check if all the parities are satisfied. This single rule may not be able to identify the undecodable blocks, as a result, the decoding time and power consumption are wasted for executing unnecessary iterations. In this work, we propose a new stopping criterion to identify the undecodable blocks in the early stage of the iterative decoding process. Furthermore, in the conventional BP decoding algorithm, the variable (check) nodes are updated in parallel. It is known that the number of iterations can be reduced by the serial scheduling algorithm. The informed dynamic scheduling (IDS) algorithms were proposed in the existing literatures to further reduce the number of iterations. However, the computational complexity involved in finding the update node in the existing IDS algorithms would not be neglected. In this work, we propose a new efficient IDS scheme which can provide better performance-complexity trade-off compared to the existing IDS ones. In addition, the iterative decoding threshold, which is used for differentiating which LDPC code is better, is investigated in this work. A family of LDPC codes, called LDPC convolutional codes, has drawn a lot of attentions from researchers in recent years due to the threshold saturation phenomenon. The IDT for an LDPC convolutional code may be computationally demanding when the termination length goes to thousand or even approaches infinity, especially for AWGN channels. In this work, we propose a fast IDT estimation algorithm which can greatly reduce the complexity of the IDT calculation for LDPC convolutional codes with arbitrary large termination length (including infinity). By utilizing our new IDT estimation algorithm, the IDTs for LDPC convolutional codes with arbitrary large termination length (including infinity) can be quickly obtained

Blind Detection of Polar Codes

Polar codes were recently chosen to protect the control channel information in the next-generation mobile communication standard (5G) defined by the 3GPP. As a result, receivers will have to implement blind detection of polar coded frames in order to keep complexity, latency, and power consumption tractable. As a newly proposed class of block codes, the problem of polar-code blind detection has received very little attention. In this work, we propose a low-complexity blind-detection algorithm for polar-encoded frames. We base this algorithm on a novel detection metric with update rules that leverage the a priori knowledge of the frozen-bit locations, exploiting the inherent structures that these locations impose on a polar-encoded block of data. We show that the proposed detection metric allows to clearly distinguish polar-encoded frames from other types of data by considering the cumulative distribution functions of the detection metric, and the receiver operating characteristic. The presented results are tailored to the 5G standardization effort discussions, i.e., we consider a short low-rate polar code concatenated with a CRC.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, to appear at the IEEE Int. Workshop on Signal Process. Syst. (SiPS) 201

Advanced Statistical Signal Processing Methods in Sensing, Detection, and Estimation for Communication Applications

The applications of wireless communications and digital signal processing have dramatically changed the way we live, work, and learn over decades. The requirement of higher throughput and ubiquitous connectivity for wireless communication systems has become prevalent nowadays. Signal sensing, detection and estimation have been prevalent in signal processing and communications for many years. The relevant studies deal with the processing of information-bearing signals for the purpose of information extraction. Nevertheless, new robust and efficient signal sensing, detection and estimation techniques are still in demand since there emerge more and more practical applications which rely on them. In this dissertation work, we proposed several novel signal sensing, detection and estimation schemes for wireless communications applications, such as spectrum sensing, symbol-detection/channel-estimation, and encoder identification. The associated theories and practice in robustness, computational complexity, and overall system performance evaluation are also provided