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 presented a genetic algorithm (GA) based LDPC code search algorithm with hardware considerations. Regular quasi-cyclic LDPC codes are used due to its friendliness to hardware implementation. Our hardware architecture design schedules pipeline LDPC decoding operation to boost the hardware utilization efficiency (HUE) of LDPC decoder. A LDPC decoder with a block size of 12288 is implemented in FPGA to validate our code and architecture design.
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 presented a genetic algorithm (GA) based LDPC code search algorithm with hardware considerations. Regular quasi-cyclic LDPC codes are used due to its friendliness to hardware implementation. Our hardware architecture design schedules pipeline LDPC decoding operation to boost the hardware utilization efficiency (HUE) of LDPC decoder. A LDPC decoder with a block size of 12288 is implemented in FPGA to validate our code and architecture design.
Low-density parity-check (LDPC) 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. Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes are an important subclass of LDPC codes that are known as one of the most effective error controlling methods. Quasi cyclic codes are known to possess some degree of regularity. Many important communication standards such as DVB-S2 and 802.16e use these codes. The proposed Optimized Min-Sum decoding algorithm performs very close to the Sum-Product decoding while preserving the main features of the Min-Sum decoding, that is low complexity and independence with respect to noise variance estimation errors.Proposed decoder is well matched for VLSI implementation and will be implemented on Xilinx FPGA family
In this paper, we construct the cyclic block-type low-density parity-check (CB-LDPC) codes for low complexity hardware implementation. The CB-LDPC code, which is a special class of quasi-cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC), has an efficient encoding algorithm due to the simple structure of their parity-check matrices. A distribution of irregular parity-check matrix for the CB-LDPC is developed so that we can obtain an area-efficient decoder design, good error correction performance, and low complexity architecture implementation. The CB-LDPC code decoding uses the iterative min-sum algorithm (MSA) and the block parallel connection design to improve the hardware architecture complexity and area.
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 recent years, the amount of digital data which is stored and transmitted for private and public usage has increased considerably. To allow a save transmission and storage of data despite of error-prone transmission media, error correcting codes are used. A large variety of codes has been developed, and in the past decade low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes which have an excellent error correction performance became more and more popular. Today, low-density parity-check codes have been adopted for several standards, and efficient decoder hardware architectures are known for the chosen structured codes. However, the existing decoder designs lack flexibility as only few structured codes can be decoded with one decoder chip. In consequence, different codes require a redesign of the decoder, and few solutions exist for decoding of codes which are not quasi-cyclic or which are unstructured. In this thesis, three different approaches are presented for the implementation of fully programmable LDPC decoders which can decode arbitrary LDPC codes. As a design study, the first programmable decoder which uses a heuristic mapping algorithm is realized on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and error correction curves are measured to verify the correct functionality. The main contribution of this thesis lies in the development of the second and the third architecture and an appropriate mapping algorithm. The proposed fully programmable decoder architectures use one-phase message passing and layered decoding and can decode arbitrary LDPC codes using an optimum mapping and scheduling algorithm. The presented programmable architectures are in fact generalized decoder architectures from which the known decoder architectures for structured LDPC codes can be derived.
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.
Low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, are a family of error-correcting codes, their performances close to the Shannon limit make them very attractive solutions for digital communication systems. There are several algorithms for decoding LDPC codes that show great diversity in terms of performance related to error correction. Also, very recently, many research papers involved the genetic algorithm (GA) in coding theory, in particular, in the decoding linear block codes case, which has heavily contributed to reducing the bit error rate (BER). In this paper, an efficient method based on the GA is proposed and it is used to improve the power of correction in terms of BER and the frame error rate (FER) of LDPC codes. Subsequently, the proposed algorithm can independently decide the most suitable moment to stop the decoding process, moreover, it does not require channel information (CSI) making it adaptable for all types of channels with different noise or intensity. The simulations show that the proposed algorithm is more efficient in terms of BER compared to other LDPC code decoders.