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IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW)

Suppressing pseudocodewords by penalizing the objective of LP decoding

Xishuo Liu, Stark Christiaan Draper, Benjamin Recht

Published Sep 1, 2012• 26 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new class of decoders for low density parity check (LDPC) codes. We are motivated by the observation that the linear programming (LP) decoder has worse error performance than belief propagation (BP) decoders at low SNRs. We base our new decoders on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) decomposition technique for LP decoding. The ADMM not only efficiently solves the LP decoding problem, but also makes it possible to explore other decoding algorithms. In particular, we add various penalty terms to the linear objective of LP decoding with the goal of suppressing pseudocodewords. Simulation results show that the new decoders achieve much better error performance compared to LP decoder at low SNRs. What is more, similar to the LP decoder, no error floor is observed at high SNRs.

DOI
10.1109/itw.2012.6404695

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In this paper, we present a new class of decoders for low density parity check (LDPC) codes. We are motivated by the observation that the linear programming (LP) decoder has worse error performance than belief propagation (BP) decoders at low SNRs. We base our new decoders on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) decomposition technique for LP decoding. The ADMM not only efficiently solves the LP decoding problem, but also makes it possible to explore other decoding algorithms. In particular, we add various penalty terms to the linear objective of LP decoding with the goal of suppressing pseudocodewords. Simulation results show that the new decoders achieve much better error performance compared to LP decoder at low SNRs. What is more, similar to the LP decoder, no error floor is observed at high SNRs.
Linear programming (LP) decoding for low-density parity-check codes was introduced by Feldman et al. and has been shown to have theoretical guarantees in several regimes. Furthermore, it has been reported in the literature-via simulation and via instanton analysis-that LP decoding displays better error rate performance at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) than does belief propagation (BP) decoding. However, at low SNRs, LP decoding is observed to have worse performance than BP. In this paper, we seek to improve LP decoding at low SNRs while maintaining LP decoding's high SNR performance. Our main contribution is a new class of decoders obtained by applying the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm to a set of non-convex optimization problems. These non-convex problems are constructed by adding a penalty term to the objective of LP decoding. The goal of the penalty is to make pseudocodewords, which are non-integer vertices of the LP relaxation, more costly. We name this class of decoders-ADMM penalized decoders. For low and moderate SNRs, we simulate ADMM penalized decoding with ℓ1and ℓ2penalties. We find that these decoders can outperform both BP and LP decoding. For high SNRs, where it is difficult to obtain data via simulation, we use an instanton analysis and find that, asymptotically, ADMM penalized decoding performs better than BP but not as well as LP. Unfortunately, since ADMM penalized decoding is not a convex program, we have not been successful in developing theoretical guarantees. However, the non-convex program can be approximated using a sequence of linear programs; an approach that yields a reweighted LP decoder. We show that a two-round reweighted LP decoder has an improved theoretical recovery threshold when compared with LP decoding. In addition, we find via simulation that reweighted LP decoding significantly attains lower error rates than LP decoding at low SNRs.
Linear programming (LP) decoding for low-density parity-check codes was introduced by Feldman et al. and has been shown to have theoretical guarantees in several regimes. Furthermore, it has been reported in the literature-via simulation and via instanton analysis-that LP decoding displays better error rate performance at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) than does belief propagation (BP) decoding. However, at low SNRs, LP decoding is observed to have worse performance than BP. In this paper, we seek to improve LP decoding at low SNRs while maintaining LP decoding's high SNR performance. Our main contribution is a new class of decoders obtained by applying the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm to a set of non-convex optimization problems. These non-convex problems are constructed by adding a penalty term to the objective of LP decoding. The goal of the penalty is to make pseudocodewords, which are non-integer vertices of the LP relaxation, more costly. We name this class of decoders-ADMM penalized decoders. For low and moderate SNRs, we simulate ADMM penalized decoding with ℓ 1 and ℓ 2 penalties. We find that these decoders can outperform both BP and LP decoding. For high SNRs, where it is difficult to obtain data via simulation, we use an instanton analysis and find that, asymptotically, ADMM penalized decoding performs better than BP but not as well as LP. Unfortunately, since ADMM penalized decoding is not a convex program, we have not been successful in developing theoretical guarantees. However, the non-convex program can be approximated using a sequence of linear programs; an approach that yields a reweighted LP decoder. We show that a two-round reweighted LP decoder has an improved theoretical recovery threshold when compared with LP decoding. In addition, we find via simulation that reweighted LP decoding significantly attains lower error rates than LP decoding at low SNRs.
Linear programming (LP) decoding for low density parity check (LDPC) codes proposed by Feldman et al. has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Despite having theoretical guarantees in some regimes, at low SNRs LP decoding is observed to have worse error performance than belief propagation (BP) decoding. In this paper, we present a novel decoding algorithm obtained by trying to solve a non-convex optimization problem using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). This non-convex problem is constructed by adding an ℓ1penalty term to the LP decoding objective. The goal of the penalty term is to make “pseudocodewords”, which are the non-integer vertices of the LP relaxation to which the LP decoder fails, more costly. We name this the “ℓ1penalized decoder”. We also develop a reweighted LP decoding algorithm base on this ℓ1penalized objective. We show that this reweighted LP has an improved theoretical recovery threshold compared to the original LP. In addition, simulations show that, in comparison to LP decoding, these two decoders both achieve significantly lower error rates and are not observed to have an “error floor”. In particular, the ℓ1penalized decoder meets or outperforms the BP decoder at all SNRs.
The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has proven to be an efficient approach for implementing linear programming (LP) decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. By introducing penalty terms into the LP decoding model's objective function, ADMM-based variable node penalized decoding effectively mitigates non-integral solutions, thereby improving frame error rate (FER) performance, especially in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. In this paper, we leverage the ADMM framework to derive explicit iterative steps for solving the LP decoding problem for LDPC codes with penalty functions. To further enhance decoding efficiency and accuracy, We propose an LDPC code decoding algorithm based on the symmetric ADMM (S-ADMM). We also establish some contraction properties satisfied by the iterative sequence of the algorithm. Through simulation experiments, we evaluate the proposed S-ADMM decoder using three standard LDPC codes and three representative fifth-generation (5G) codes. The results show that the S-ADMM decoder consistently outperforms conventional ADMM penalized decoders, offering significant improvements in decoding performance.
Based on linear programming (LP) decoding with alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), Liu et al. proposed an ADMM penalized decoder for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes that can improve the error rate performance at low signal-to-noise ratios. In this letter, we propose a new ADMM penalized decoder to improve the error rate performance further for irregular LDPC codes. The proposed decoder modifies the penalty term of the objective function by assigning different penalty parameters for different variable node degrees. Simulations over three irregular LDPC codes show that the proposed decoder performs considerably better than the ADMM penalized decoder.
ADMM LP decoding of non-binary LDPC codes in F2m\mathbb{F}_{2^m}F2m​
In this paper, we develop efficient decoders for non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We apply ADMM to two decoding problems. The first problem is linear programming (LP) decoding. In order to develop an efficient algorithm, we focus on non-binary codes in fields of characteristic two. This allows us to transform each constraint in F2m\mathbb{F}_{2^m}F2m​ to a set of constraints in F2\mathbb{F}_{2}F2​ that has a factor graph representation. Applying ADMM to the LP decoding problem results in two types of non-trivial sub-routines. The first type requires us to solve an unconstrained quadratic program. We solve this problem efficiently by leveraging new results obtained from studying the above factor graphs. The second type requires Euclidean projection onto polytopes that are studied in the literature, a projection that can be solved efficiently using off-the-shelf techniques, which scale linearly in the dimension of the vector to project. ADMM LP decoding scales linearly with block length, linearly with check degree, and quadratically with field size. The second problem we consider is a penalized LP decoding problem. This problem is obtained by incorporating a penalty term into the LP decoding objective. The purpose of the penalty term is to make non-integer solutions (pseudocodewords) more expensive and hence to improve decoding performance. The ADMM algorithm for the penalized LP problem requires Euclidean projection onto a polytope formed by embedding the constraints specified by the non-binary single parity-check code, which can be solved by applying the ADMM technique to the resulting quadratic program. Empirically, this decoder achieves a much reduced error rate than LP decoding at low signal-to-noise ratios.