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IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW)

Evaluation of the Low Frame Error Rate Performance of LDPC Codes Using Importance Sampling

Lara Dolecek, Zhengya Zhang, Martin J. Wainwright, Venkat Anantharam, Borivoje Nikolić

Published Sep 1, 2007• 48 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present an importance sampling method for the evaluation of the low frame error rate (FER) performance of LDPC codes under iterative decoding. It relies on a combinatorial characterization of absorbing sets, which are the dominant cause of decoder failure in the low FER region. The biased density in the importance sampling scheme is a mean-shifted version of the original Gaussian density, which is suitably centered between a codeword and a dominant absorbing set. This choice of biased density yields an unbiased estimator for the FER with a variance lower by several orders of magnitude than the standard Monte Carlo estimator. Using this importance sampling scheme in software, we obtain good agreement with the experimental results obtained from a fast hardware emulator of the decoder.

DOI
10.1109/itw.2007.4313074

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•Apr 15, 2010•5 citations
We present an importance sampling method for the evaluation of the low frame error rate (FER) performance of LDPC codes under iterative decoding. It relies on a combinatorial characterization of absorbing sets, which are the dominant cause of decoder failure in the low FER region. The biased density in the importance sampling scheme is a mean-shifted version of the original Gaussian density, which is suitably centered between a codeword and a dominant absorbing set. This choice of biased density yields an unbiased estimator for the FER with a variance lower by several orders of magnitude than the standard Monte Carlo estimator. Using this importance sampling scheme in software, we obtain good agreement with the experimental results obtained from a fast hardware emulator of the decoder.
This study shows a new design method of a simulation probability density function (PDF) for a fast frame error rate (FER) evaluation of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. It is difficult to evaluate a very low FER of LDPC codes by Monte Carlo simulation methods since it has excellent performance under iterative decoding. Cole et al. proposed a three-step estimation method of the low FER of LDPC codes of moderate block length. By applying the importance sampling method, which is one of the fast simulation methods, the simulation time of the error performance of LDPC codes can be reduced. Another simulation PDF, which can treat more dominant trapping sets (TS) than Cole et al.'s method, is proposed. The selection of the dominant TS as proportional to its probability reduces the number of simulation runs without deteriorating the accuracy of the estimator. Unbiased estimator is given as well as that that of the Cole et al.'s method. Some numerical examples are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulation time for an LDPC code of length 504 is reduced to 1/10 when we evaluate FER of around 10-14.
Abstract — The error-correcting performance of low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, when decoded using practical iterative decoding, is known to approach Shannon limits in the asymptotic limit of large blocklengths. A substantial limitation to the use of finite-length LDPC codes is the presence of an error floor in the low frame error rate (FER) region. This paper develops a method, based on importance sampling and high SNR asymptotics as applied to suitably defined absorbing structures within the LDPC code, to predict error floors. Our results are in very close agreement with hardware-based experimental results, and moreover extend the prediction of the error probability to even lower regions. We compute both importance sampling estimates of error probabilities and deterministic estimates that are guaranteed to lower bound the error probability in the high SNR regime. I.
The error-correcting performance of low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, when decoded using practical iterative decoding algorithms, is known to be close to Shannon limits for codes with suitably large blocklengths. A substantial limitation to the use of finite-length LDPC codes is the presence of an error floor in the low frame error rate (FER) region. This paper develops a deterministic method of predicting error floors, based on high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) asymptotics, applied to absorbing sets within structured LDPC codes. The approach is illustrated using a class of array-based LDPC codes, taken as exemplars of high-performance structured LDPC codes. The results are in very good agreement with a stochastic method based on importance sampling which, in turn, matches the hardware-based experimental results. The importance sampling scheme uses a mean-shifted version of the original Gaussian density, appropriately centered between a codeword and a dominant absorbing set, to produce an unbiased estimator of the FER with substantial computational savings over a standard Monte Carlo estimator. Our deterministic estimates are guaranteed to be a lower bound to the error probability in the high SNR regime, and extend the prediction of the error probability to as low as 10-30. By adopting a channel-independent viewpoint, the usefulness of these results is demonstrated for both the standard Gaussian channel and a channel with mixture noise.
The performance of LDPC codes decoded by iterative algorithm depends on the structural properties of their underlying Tanner graphs. For discrete memoryless channels, error patterns dominating the frame error rate (FER) in the error floor region are termed trapping set. We have shown approximate examinations of small trapping sets of LDPC codes using the probabilistic algorithm. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for the detailed evaluation of the FER of LDPC codes in the error floor region. The accuracy of the FER lies on the failure probability of the number of trapping sets determined by our probabilistic algorithm and the FER estimated by the importance sampling.
We introduce an Importance Sampling (IS) method that successfully simulates the performance of Low density Parity Check (LDPC) Codes in an AWGN channel at very low bit error rates (BERs). By effectively finding and biasing bit node combinations that are the dominant sources of error events, called trapping sets, the developed technique provokes more frequent decoder failures. Consequently, fewer simulation runs and higher simulation gains are achieved. Regardless of the block size of an LDPC code, only a few dominant trapping set classes cause decoder failures at low BER regions. Therefore, the proposed technique allows the performance evaluation for any size LDPC code at very low BER regions with remarkable simulation gains. For BERs of 10-20, we observed simulation gains on the order of 1014.
In this paper, we propose an estimation method of a very low bit error rate (HER) of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. No analytical tool is available to evaluate performance of LDPC codes, and traditional Monte Carlo simulation methods can not estimate low HER of LDPC codes due to the limitation of time. Cole et al, show a fast frame error rate simulation method of LDPC codes by applying importance sampling (IS). At first, we extend Cole et aI.'s method to the HER estimation of LDPC codes. Since the simulation time of the HER evaluation version of the Cole et aI.'s method is proportional to the number of total dominant trapping sets used in the simulation, we should appropriately choose the dominant trapping sets to reduce the simulation time. To avoid the difficulty, we propose another simulation method, which selects a dominant trapping set as proportional to its upper bound. Additionally, we show some numerical examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. When we evaluate HER of 10−16, the simulation time of the proposed method is reduced to 1/6.6 of that of the HER evaluation version of the Cole et al.'s method under the condition of the same accuracy of the estimator.