Minimum Pseudoweight Analysis of 3-Dimensional Turbo Codes

In this work, we consider pseudocodewords of (relaxed) linear programming (LP) decoding of 3-dimensional turbo codes (3D-TCs). We present a relaxed LP decoder for 3D-TCs, adapting the relaxed LP decoder for conventional turbo codes proposed by Feldman in his thesis. We show that the 3D-TC polytope is proper and $C$-symmetric, and make a connection to finite graph covers of the 3D-TC factor graph. This connection is used to show that the support set of any pseudocodeword is a stopping set of iterative decoding of 3D-TCs using maximum a posteriori constituent decoders on the binary erasure channel. Furthermore, we compute ensemble-average pseudoweight enumerators of 3D-TCs and perform a finite-length minimum pseudoweight analysis for small cover degrees. Also, an explicit description of the fundamental cone of the 3D-TC polytope is given. Finally, we present an extensive numerical study of small-to-medium block length 3D-TCs, which shows that 1) typically (i.e., in most cases) when the minimum distance $d_{\rm min}$ and/or the stopping distance $h_{\rm min}$ is high, the minimum pseudoweight (on the additive white Gaussian noise channel) is strictly smaller than both the $d_{\rm min}$ and the $h_{\rm min}$, and 2) the minimum pseudoweight grows with the block length, at least for small-to-medium block lengths.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Mathematical Programming Decoding of Binary Linear Codes: Theory and Algorithms

Mathematical programming is a branch of applied mathematics and has recently been used to derive new decoding approaches, challenging established but often heuristic algorithms based on iterative message passing. Concepts from mathematical programming used in the context of decoding include linear, integer, and nonlinear programming, network flows, notions of duality as well as matroid and polyhedral theory. This survey article reviews and categorizes decoding methods based on mathematical programming approaches for binary linear codes over binary-input memoryless symmetric channels.Comment: 17 pages, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Published July 201

Pseudocodewords of linear programming decoding of 3-dimensional turbo codes

In this work, we consider pseudocodewords of (relaxed) linear programming (LP) decoding of 3-dimensional turbo codes (3D-TCs), recently introduced by Berrou et al.. Here, we consider binary 3D-TCs while the original work of Berrou et al. considered double-binary codes. We present a relaxed LP decoder for 3D-TCs, which is an adaptation of the relaxed LP decoder for conventional turbo codes proposed by Feldman in his thesis. The vertices of this relaxed polytope are the pseudocodewords. We show that the support set of any pseudocodeword is a stopping set of iterative decoding of 3D-TCs using maximum a posteriori constituent decoders on the binary erasure channel. Furthermore, we present a numerical study of small block length 3D-TCs, which shows that typically the minimum pseudoweight (on the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel) is smaller than both the minimum distance and the stopping distance. In particular, we performed an exhaustive search over all interleaver pairs in the 3D-TC (with input block length K = 128) based on quadratic permutation polynomials over integer rings with a quadratic inverse. The search shows that the best minimum AWGN pseudoweight is strictly smaller than the best minimum/stopping distance

Tree-Based Construction of LDPC Codes Having Good Pseudocodeword Weights

We present a tree-based construction of LDPC codes that have minimum pseudocodeword weight equal to or almost equal to the minimum distance, and perform well with iterative decoding. The construction involves enumerating a $d$-regular tree for a fixed number of layers and employing a connection algorithm based on permutations or mutually orthogonal Latin squares to close the tree. Methods are presented for degrees $d=p^s$ and $d = p^s+1$, for $p$ a prime. One class corresponds to the well-known finite-geometry and finite generalized quadrangle LDPC codes; the other codes presented are new. We also present some bounds on pseudocodeword weight for $p$-ary LDPC codes. Treating these codes as $p$-ary LDPC codes rather than binary LDPC codes improves their rates, minimum distances, and pseudocodeword weights, thereby giving a new importance to the finite geometry LDPC codes where $p > 2$.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Information Theory. Submitted: Oct. 1, 2005; Revised: May 1, 2006, Nov. 25, 200

Distance Properties of Short LDPC Codes and their Impact on the BP, ML and Near-ML Decoding Performance

Parameters of LDPC codes, such as minimum distance, stopping distance, stopping redundancy, girth of the Tanner graph, and their influence on the frame error rate performance of the BP, ML and near-ML decoding over a BEC and an AWGN channel are studied. Both random and structured LDPC codes are considered. In particular, the BP decoding is applied to the code parity-check matrices with an increasing number of redundant rows, and the convergence of the performance to that of the ML decoding is analyzed. A comparison of the simulated BP, ML, and near-ML performance with the improved theoretical bounds on the error probability based on the exact weight spectrum coefficients and the exact stopping size spectrum coefficients is presented. It is observed that decoding performance very close to the ML decoding performance can be achieved with a relatively small number of redundant rows for some codes, for both the BEC and the AWGN channels

Design of LDPC codes and reliable practical decoders for standard and non-standard channels

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Decoding error-correcting codes via linear programming

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-151).Error-correcting codes are fundamental tools used to transmit digital information over unreliable channels. Their study goes back to the work of Hamming [Ham50] and Shannon [Sha48], who used them as the basis for the field of information theory. The problem of decoding the original information up to the full error-correcting potential of the system is often very complex, especially for modern codes that approach the theoretical limits of the communication channel. In this thesis we investigate the application of linear programming (LP) relaxation to the problem of decoding an error-correcting code. Linear programming relaxation is a standard technique in approximation algorithms and operations research, and is central to the study of efficient algorithms to find good (albeit suboptimal) solutions to very difficult optimization problems. Our new "LP decoders" have tight combinatorial characterizations of decoding success that can be used to analyze error-correcting performance. Furthermore, LP decoders have the desirable (and rare) property that whenever they output a result, it is guaranteed to be the optimal result: the most likely (ML) information sent over the channel. We refer to this property as the ML certificate property. We provide specific LP decoders for two major families of codes: turbo codes and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These codes have received a great deal of attention recently due to their unprecedented error-correcting performance.(cont.) Our decoder is particularly attractive for analysis of these codes because the standard message-passing algorithms used for decoding are often difficult to analyze. For turbo codes, we give a relaxation very close to min-cost flow, and show that the success of the decoder depends on the costs in a certain residual graph. For the case of rate-1/2 repeat-accumulate codes (a certain type of turbo code), we give an inverse polynomial upper bound on the probability of decoding failure. For LDPC codes (or any binary linear code), we give a relaxation based on the factor graph representation of the code. We introduce the concept of fractional distance, which is a function of the relaxation, and show that LP decoding always corrects a number of errors up to half the fractional distance. We show that the fractional distance is exponential in the girth of the factor graph. Furthermore, we give an efficient algorithm to compute this fractional distance. We provide experiments showing that the performance of our decoders are comparable to the standard message-passing decoders. We also give new provably convergent message-passing decoders based on linear programming duality that have the ML certificate property.by Jon Feldman.Ph.D

On Pseudocodewords and Improved Union Bound of Linear Programming Decoding of HDPC Codes

In this paper, we present an improved union bound on the Linear Programming (LP) decoding performance of the binary linear codes transmitted over an additive white Gaussian noise channels. The bounding technique is based on the second-order of Bonferroni-type inequality in probability theory, and it is minimized by Prim's minimum spanning tree algorithm. The bound calculation needs the fundamental cone generators of a given parity-check matrix rather than only their weight spectrum, but involves relatively low computational complexity. It is targeted to high-density parity-check codes, where the number of their generators is extremely large and these generators are spread densely in the Euclidean space. We explore the generator density and make a comparison between different parity-check matrix representations. That density effects on the improvement of the proposed bound over the conventional LP union bound. The paper also presents a complete pseudo-weight distribution of the fundamental cone generators for the BCH[31,21,5] code