The common approach for the design of an error correction system is first to construct a code and then to define the hardware structure of the encoder and decoder. However, in the case of LDPC codes (low-density parity-check) such a constructed code is generally not well suited for a hardware implementation. It has been recognized that the code construction and hardware design must be considered jointly to facilitate LDPC decoder and encoder implementation. In this paper, an efficient decoder structure for regular and irregular LDPC codes, based on TDMP (turbo-decoding message passing) scheme is designed first. The decoder has been implemented and verified in an FPGA device. Constraints for the parity check matrix of a code to be suitable for the decoder architecture are defined. Then an algorithm for LDPC parity check matrix construction subject to these constraints is presented. The algorithm aims at improving performance of the code in the low SNR region by employing irregular codes as well as in high SNR region by reducing the number of small Stopping Sets and Trapping Sets in the Tanner graph of the code making use of a computer search technique.
The common approach for the design of an error correction system is first to construct a code and then to define the hardware structure of the encoder and decoder. However, in the case of LDPC codes (low-density parity-check) such a constructed code is generally not well suited for a hardware implementation. It has been recognized that the code construction and hardware design must be considered jointly to facilitate LDPC decoder and encoder implementation. In this paper, an efficient decoder structure for regular and irregular LDPC codes, based on TDMP (turbo-decoding message passing) scheme is designed first. The decoder has been implemented and verified in an FPGA device. Constraints for the parity check matrix of a code to be suitable for the decoder architecture are defined. Then an algorithm for LDPC parity check matrix construction subject to these constraints is presented. The algorithm aims at improving performance of the code in the low SNR region by employing irregular codes as well as in high SNR region by reducing the number of small Stopping Sets and Trapping Sets in the Tanner graph of the code making use of a computer search technique.
In this paper, we propose a turbo decoding message-passing (TDMP) algorithm to decode regular and irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The TDMP algorithm has two main advantages over the commonly employed two-phase message-passing algorithm. First, it exhibits a faster convergence behavior (up to 50% less iterations), and improvement in coding gain (up to an order of magnitude for moderate-to-high SNR and small number of iterations). Second, the corresponding decoder architecture has a significantly reduced memory requirement that amounts to a savings of (75 + 25n//spl Sigma/ node-degrees)% > 75% for code-length n. A decoder architecture featuring the TDNW algorithm is also presented. Furthermore, we propose a new structure on the parity-check matrix of an LDPC code based on permutation matrices aimed at reducing interconnect complexity and improving decoding throughput. In addition, we construct a wide range of LDPC codes based on Ramanujan graphs which possess this structure.
This paper presents a design approach for low-density parity-check (LDPC) coding system hardware implementation by jointly conceiving irregular LDPC code construction and VLSI implementations of encoder and decoder. The key idea is to construct good irregular LDPC codes subject to two constraints that ensure the effective LDPC encoder and decoder hardware implementations. We propose a heuristic algorithm to construct such implementation-aware irregular LDPC codes that can achieve very good error correction performance. The encoder and decoder hardware architectures are correspondingly presented.
Terrestrial digital multimedia TV/handle broadcasting (DMB-TH) is a newly upcoming framing structure, channel coding and modulation for digital television terrestrial broadcasting system standard of China, which is recently drafted and is ready to be verified in order to deploy mobile multimedia broadcasting services for the public. The adoption of strong channel coding techniques appears to be of key importance for mobile operators and broadcasters. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been widely considered as error-correcting codes for next generation communication systems. A good LDPC decoder design requires both implementation friendly LDPC codes and efficient decoder architectures. The quality of LDPC code is crucial in determining the coding gain and implementation complexity of LDPC hardware decoders. This paper presents a turbo-decoding message-passing algorithm (TDMP) based LDPC code search algorithm with hardware considerations. The main advantages of the proposed algorithm over the DMB-TH standard decoding algorithm are 1) improvement in coding gain by an order of magnitude at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), 2) reduced decoder complexity. The performance of the proposed TDMP architecture is shown by the comparison of simulation results.
With the superior error correction capability, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have initiated wide scale interests in satellite communication, wireless communication, and storage fields. In the past, various structures of single code-rate LDPC decoders have been reported. However, to cover a wide range of service requirements and diverse interference conditions in wireless applications, LDPC decoders that can operate at both high and low code rates are desirable. In this paper, a 9-k code length multi-rate LDPC decoder architecture is presented and implemented on a Xilinx field-programmable gate array device. Using pin selection, three operating modes, namely, the irregular 1/2 code mode, the regular 5/8 code mode, and the regular 7/8 code mode, are supported. Furthermore, to suppress the error floor level, a characterization on the conditions for short cycles in a LDPC code matrix expanded from a small base matrix is presented, and a cycle elimination algorithm is developed to detect and break such short cycles. The effectiveness of the cycle elimination algorithm has been verified by both simulation and hardware measurements, which show that the error floor is suppressed to a much lower level without incurring any performance penalty. The implemented decoder is tested in an experimental LDPC orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system and achieves the superior measured performance of block error rate below 10/sup -7/ at signal-to-noise ratio of 1.8 dB.
In this paper, a method for constructing Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes of good performance in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) using a computer search algorithm is presented. First, LDPC codes and encoding along with its Tanner graph representation is described. Then, a detailed description of the proposed construction algorithm is given. A Modified Shortest-Path (MSP) Algorithm of lower complexity is applied to obtain a code graph of the desired structure. The proposed algorithm works directly on the parity-check matrix of the LDPC code. The parity-check matrix of the code is constructed column by column subject to the bit-degree and girth constraints. Using the proposed algorithm, both regular and irregular LDPC codes have been constructed. Furthermore, not only have the girth been improved but also the rate of LDPC codes. Finally, by simulation results the constructed codes were shown to perform well over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.
Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been shown to have good error correcting performance approaching Shannon’s limit. Good error correcting performance enables efficient and reliable communication. However, a LDPC code decoding algorithm needs to be executed efficiently to meet cost, time, power and bandwidth requirements of target applications. The constructed codes should also meet error rate performance requirements of those applications. Since their rediscovery, there has been much research work on LDPC code construction and implementation. LDPC codes can be designed over a wide space with parameters such as girth, rate and length. There is no unique method of constructing LDPC codes. Existing construction methods are limited in some way in producing good error correcting performing and easily implementable codes for a given rate and length. There is a need to develop methods of constructing codes over a wide range of rates and lengths with good performance and ease of hardware implementability. LDPC code hardware design and implementation depend on the structure of target LDPC code and is also as varied as LDPC matrix designs and constructions. There are several factors to be considered including decoding algorithm computations,processing nodes interconnection network, number of processing nodes, amount of memory, number of quantization bits and decoding delay. All of these issues can be handled in several different ways. \nThis thesis is about construction of LDPC codes and their hardware implementation. LDPC code construction and implementation issues mentioned above are too many to be addressed in one thesis. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of LDPC code construction methods for some classes of structured LDPC codes and techniques for reducing decoding time. We introduce two main methods for constructing structured codes. In the first method, column-weight two LDPC codes are derived from distance graphs. A wide range of girths, rates and lengths are obtained compared to existing methods. The performance and implementation complexity of obtained codes depends on the structure of their corresponding distance graphs. In the second method, a search algorithm based on bit-filing and progressive-edge growth algorithms is introduced for constructing quasi-cyclic LDPC codes. The algorithm can be used to form a distance or Tanner graph of a code. This method could also obtain codes over a wide range of parameters. Cycles of length four are avoided by observing the row-column constraint. \nRow-column connections observing this condition are searched sequentially or randomly. Although the girth conditions are not sufficient beyond six, larger girths codes were easily obtained especially at low rates. The advantage of this algorithm compared to other methods is its flexibility. It could be used to construct codes for a given rate and length with girths of at least six for any sub-matrix configuration or rearrangement. The code size is also easily varied by increasing or decreasing sub-matrix size. Codes obtained using a sequential search criteria show poor performance at low girths (6 and 8) while random searches result in good performing codes. \nQuasi-cyclic codes could be implemented in a variety of decoder architectures. One of the many options is the choice of processing nodes interconnect. We show how quasi-cyclic codes processing could be scheduled through a multistage network. Although these net-works have more delay than other modes of communication, they offer more flexibility at a reasonable cost. Banyan and Benes networks are suggested as the most suitable networks. \nDecoding delay is also one of several issues considered in decoder design and implementation. In this thesis, we overlap check and variable node computations to reduce decoding time. Three techniques are discussed, two of which are introduced in this thesis. The techniques are code matrix permutation, matrix space restriction and sub-matrix row-column scheduling. Matrix permutation rearranges the parity-check matrix such that rows and columns that do not have connections in common are separated. This techniques can be applied to any matrix. Its effectiveness largely depends on the structure of the code. We show that its success also depends on the size of row and column weights. Matrix space restriction is another technique that can be applied to any code and has fixed reduction in time or amount of overlap. Its success depends on the amount of restriction and may be traded with performance loss. The third technique already suggested in literature relies on the internal cyclic structure of sub-matrices to achieve overlapping. The technique is limited to LDPC code matrices in which the number of sub-matrices is equal to row and column weights. We show that it can be applied to other codes with a lager number of sub-matrices than code weights. However, in this case maximum overlap is not guaranteed. We calculate the lower bound on the amount of overlapping. Overlapping could be applied to any sub-matrix configuration of quasi-cyclic codes by arbitrarily choosing \nthe starting rows for processing. Overlapping decoding time depends on inter-iteration waiting times. We show that there are upper bounds on waiting times which depend on the code weights. Waiting times could be further reduced by restricting shifts in identity sub-matrices or using smaller sub-matrices. This overlapping technique can reduce the decoding time by up to 50% compared to conventional message and computation scheduling. \nTechniques of matrix permutation and space restriction results in decoder architectures that are flexible in LDPC code design in terms of code weights and size. This is due to the fact that with these techniques, rows and columns are processed in sequential order to achieve overlapping. However, in the existing technique, all sub-matrices have to be processed in parallel to achieve overlapping. Parallel processing of all code sub-matrices requires the architecture to have the number of processing units at least equal to the number sub-matrices. Processing units and memory space should therefore be distributed among the sub-matrices according to the sub-matrices arrangement. This leads to high complexity or inflexibility in the decoder architecture. We propose a simple, programmable and high throughput decoder architecture based on matrix permutation and space restriction techniques.