Design of rate-compatible structured LDPC codes for hybrid ARQ applications

In this paper, families of rate-compatible protograph-based LDPC codes that are suitable for incremental-redundancy hybrid ARQ applications are constructed. A systematic technique to construct low-rate base codes from a higher rate code is presented. The base codes are designed to be robust against erasures while having a good performance on error channels. A progressive node puncturing algorithm is devised to construct a family of higher rate codes from the base code. The performance of this puncturing algorithm is compared to other puncturing schemes. Using the techniques in this paper, one can construct a rate-compatible family of codes with rates ranging from 0.1 to 0.9 that are within 1 dB from the channel capacity and have good error floors

On rate-compatible punctured turbo codes design

We propose and compare some design criteria for the search of good systematic rate-compatible punctured turbo code (RCPTC) families. The considerations presented by S. Benedetto et al. (1998) to find the "best" component encoders for turbo code construction are extended to find good rate-compatible puncturing patterns for a given interleaver length . This approach is shown to lead to codes that improve over previous ones, both in the maximum-likelihood sense (using transfer function bounds) and in the iterative decoding sense (through simulation results). To find simulation and analytical results, the coded bits are transmitted over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel using an antipodal binary modulation. The two main applications of this technique are its use in hybrid incremental ARQ/FEC schemes and its use to achieve unequal error protection of an information sequence

Blind Reconciliation

Information reconciliation is a crucial procedure in the classical post-processing of quantum key distribution (QKD). Poor reconciliation efficiency, revealing more information than strictly needed, may compromise the maximum attainable distance, while poor performance of the algorithm limits the practical throughput in a QKD device. Historically, reconciliation has been mainly done using close to minimal information disclosure but heavily interactive procedures, like Cascade, or using less efficient but also less interactive -just one message is exchanged- procedures, like the ones based in low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The price to pay in the LDPC case is that good efficiency is only attained for very long codes and in a very narrow range centered around the quantum bit error rate (QBER) that the code was designed to reconcile, thus forcing to have several codes if a broad range of QBER needs to be catered for. Real world implementations of these methods are thus very demanding, either on computational or communication resources or both, to the extent that the last generation of GHz clocked QKD systems are finding a bottleneck in the classical part. In order to produce compact, high performance and reliable QKD systems it would be highly desirable to remove these problems. Here we analyse the use of short-length LDPC codes in the information reconciliation context using a low interactivity, blind, protocol that avoids an a priori error rate estimation. We demonstrate that 2x10^3 bits length LDPC codes are suitable for blind reconciliation. Such codes are of high interest in practice, since they can be used for hardware implementations with very high throughput.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figure

Myths and Realities of Rateless Coding

Fixed-rate and rateless channel codes are generally treated separately in the related research literature and so, a novice in the field inevitably gets the impression that these channel codes are unrelated. By contrast, in this treatise, we endeavor to further develop a link between the traditional fixed-rate codes and the recently developed rateless codes by delving into their underlying attributes. This joint treatment is beneficial for two principal reasons. First, it facilitates the task of researchers and practitioners, who might be familiar with fixed-rate codes and would like to jump-start their understanding of the recently developed concepts in the rateless reality. Second, it provides grounds for extending the use of the well-understood code design tools — originally contrived for fixed-rate codes — to the realm of rateless codes. Indeed, these versatile tools proved to be vital in the design of diverse fixed-rate-coded communications systems, and thus our hope is that they will further elucidate the associated performance ramifications of the rateless coded schemes