On the Finite Length Scaling of Ternary Polar Codes

The polarization process of polar codes over a ternary alphabet is studied. Recently it has been shown that the scaling of the blocklength of polar codes with prime alphabet size scales polynomially with respect to the inverse of the gap between code rate and channel capacity. However, except for the binary case, the degree of the polynomial in the bound is extremely large. In this work, it is shown that a much lower degree polynomial can be computed numerically for the ternary case. Similar results are conjectured for the general case of prime alphabet size.Comment: Submitted to ISIT 201

Design and Analysis of Nonbinary LDPC Codes for Arbitrary Discrete-Memoryless Channels

We present an analysis, under iterative decoding, of coset LDPC codes over GF(q), designed for use over arbitrary discrete-memoryless channels (particularly nonbinary and asymmetric channels). We use a random-coset analysis to produce an effect that is similar to output-symmetry with binary channels. We show that the random selection of the nonzero elements of the GF(q) parity-check matrix induces a permutation-invariance property on the densities of the decoder messages, which simplifies their analysis and approximation. We generalize several properties, including symmetry and stability from the analysis of binary LDPC codes. We show that under a Gaussian approximation, the entire q-1 dimensional distribution of the vector messages is described by a single scalar parameter (like the distributions of binary LDPC messages). We apply this property to develop EXIT charts for our codes. We use appropriately designed signal constellations to obtain substantial shaping gains. Simulation results indicate that our codes outperform multilevel codes at short block lengths. We also present simulation results for the AWGN channel, including results within 0.56 dB of the unconstrained Shannon limit (i.e. not restricted to any signal constellation) at a spectral efficiency of 6 bits/s/Hz.Comment: To appear, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, (submitted October 2004, revised and accepted for publication, November 2005). The material in this paper was presented in part at the 41st Allerton Conference on Communications, Control and Computing, October 2003 and at the 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theor

Improved linear programming decoding of LDPC codes and bounds on the minimum and fractional distance

We examine LDPC codes decoded using linear programming (LP). Four contributions to the LP framework are presented. First, a new method of tightening the LP relaxation, and thus improving the LP decoder, is proposed. Second, we present an algorithm which calculates a lower bound on the minimum distance of a specific code. This algorithm exhibits complexity which scales quadratically with the block length. Third, we propose a method to obtain a tight lower bound on the fractional distance, also with quadratic complexity, and thus less than previously-existing methods. Finally, we show how the fundamental LP polytope for generalized LDPC codes and nonbinary LDPC codes can be obtained.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor