Noise-aided gradient descent bit-flipping decoders approaching maximum likelihood decoding

Abstract

International audienceIn the recent literature, the study of iterative LDPC decoders implemented on faulty-hardware has led to the counter-intuitive conclusion that noisy decoders could perform better than their noiseless version. This peculiar behavior has been observed in the finite codeword length regime, where the noise perturbating the decoder dynamics help to escape the attraction of fixed points such as trapping sets. In this paper, we will study two recently introduced LDPC decoders derived from noisy versions of the gradient descent bit-flipping decoder (GDBF). Although the GDBF is known to be a simple decoder with limited error correction capability compared to more powerful soft-decision decoders, it has been shown that the introduction of a random perturbation in the decoder could greatly improve the performance results, approaching and even surpassing belief propagation or min-sum based decoders. For both decoders, we evaluate the probability of escaping from a Trapping set, and relate this probability to the parameters of the injected noise distribution, using a Markovian model of the decoder transitions in the state space of errors localized on isolated trapping sets. In a second part of the paper, we present a modified scheduling of our algorithms for the binary symmetric channel, which allows to approach maximum likelihood decoding (MLD) at the cost of a very large number of iterations