Leafless elementary trapping sets (LETSs) are known to be the problematic structures in the error floor region of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the additive white Gaussian (AWGN) channel under iterative decoding algorithms. While problems involving the general category of trapping sets, and the subcategory of elementary trapping sets (ETSs), have been shown to be NP-hard, similar results for LETSs, which are a subset of ETSs, are not available. In this paper, we prove that, for a general LDPC code, finding a LETS of a given size α with minimum number of unsatisfied check nodes b is NP-hard to approximate with any guaranteed precision. We also prove that finding the minimum size a of a LETS with a given b is NP-hard to approximate. Similar results are proved for elementary absorbing sets, a popular subcategory of LETSs.
Leafless elementary trapping sets (LETSs) are known to be the problematic structures in the error floor region of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the additive white Gaussian (AWGN) channel under iterative decoding algorithms. While problems involving the general category of trapping sets, and the subcategory of elementary trapping sets (ETSs), have been shown to be NP-hard, similar results for LETSs, which are a subset of ETSs, are not available. In this paper, we prove that, for a general LDPC code, finding a LETS of a given size α with minimum number of unsatisfied check nodes b is NP-hard to approximate with any guaranteed precision. We also prove that finding the minimum size a of a LETS with a given b is NP-hard to approximate. Similar results are proved for elementary absorbing sets, a popular subcategory of LETSs.
Leafless elementary trapping sets (LETSs) are known to be the problematic structures in the error floor region of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the additive white Gaussian (AWGN) channel under iterative decoding algorithms. While problems involving the general category of trapping sets, and the subcategory of elementary trapping sets (ETSs), have been shown to be NP-hard, similar results for LETSs, which are a subset of ETSs are not available. In this paper, we prove that for a general LDPC code, finding a LETS of a given size a with minimum number of odd-degree check nodes b is NP-hard to approximate within any approximation factor. We also prove that finding the minimum size a of a LETS with a given b is NP-hard to approximate within any approximation factor. Similar results are proved for elementary absorbing sets, a popular subcategory of LETSs.
Leafless elementary trapping sets (LETSs) are known to be among the most harmful substructures of Tanner graphs of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in the error floor region. It is well-known that in the asymptotic regime of infinite block length, the only LETS structures that have finite non-zero average multiplicity are those that contain a single (simple) cycle. The average multiplicity of all the other LETSs, whose structures contain more than one cycle, tends to zero asymptotically. The asymptotic average multiplicity of LETS structures with a single cycle for variable-regular LDPC codes has already been derived by the authors in a previous work. In this paper, we compute the asymptotic average multiplicity of such structures for irregular LDPC code ensembles. The derivation involves counting the average number of cycles of a specific length with a specific combination of variable node degrees. We demonstrate that the asymptotic results, derived in this paper, match well with the LETS multiplicities of finite-length LDPC codes chosen randomly from the ensemble, even for rather short block lengths.
In this paper, we propose a characterization of elementary trapping sets (ETSs) for irregular low-density paritycheck (LDPC) codes. These sets are known to be the main culprits in the error floor region of such codes. The characterization of ETSs for irregular codes has been known to be a challenging problem due to the large variety of nonisomorphic ETS structures that can exist within the Tanner graph of these codes. This is a direct consequence of the variety of the degrees of the variable nodes that can participate in such structures. The proposed characterization is based on a hierarchical graphical representation of ETSs, starting from simple cycles of the graph, or from single variable nodes, and involves three simple expansion techniques: degree-one tree (dot), path, and lollipop, thus, the terminology dpl characterization. A similar dpl characterization was proposed in an earlier work by the authors for the leafless ETSs of variable-regular LDPC codes. The present paper generalizes the prior work to codes with a variety of variable node degrees and to ETSs that are not leafless. The proposed dpl characterization corresponds to an efficient search algorithm that, for a given irregular LDPC code, can find all the instances of (a, b) ETSs with size a and with the number of unsatisfied check nodes b within any range of interest a amax and b bmax, exhaustively. Although branch-&-bound exhaustive search algorithms for finding ETSs of irregular LDPC codes exist, to the best of our knowledge, the proposed search algorithm is the first of its kind, in that, it is devised based on a characterization of ETSs that makes the search process efficient. For a constant degree distribution and range of search, the worst-case complexity of the proposed dpl algorithm increases linearly with the block length n. The average complexity, excluding the search for the input simple cycles, is constant in n. Extensive simulation results are presented to show the versatility of the search algorithm, and to demonstrate that, compared to the literature, significant improvement in search speed can be obtained.
The performance of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in the error floor region is closely related to some substructures of the code's Tanner graph, collectively referred to as trapping sets (TSs). In this paper, we study the asymptotic average number of different types of trapping sets such as elementary TSs (ETS), leafless ETSs (LETS), absorbing sets (ABS), elementary ABSs (EABS), and stopping sets (SS), in random variable-regular and irregular LDPC code ensembles. We demonstrate that, regardless of the type of the TS, as the code's length tends to infinity, the average number of a given structure tends to infinity, to a positive constant, or to zero, if the structure contains no cycle, only one cycle, or more than one cycle, respectively. For the case where the structure contains a single cycle, we obtain an estimate of the expected number of the structure through the available approximations for the average number of the constituent cycle. These estimates, which are independent of the block length and only depend on the code's degree distributions, are shown to be accurate even for finite-length codes.
Trapping sets are known to be the main cause for the error floor of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. They are often classified by their size a and the number of unsatisfied check nodes b in their subgraph. Trapping sets can be partitioned into two categories of elementary and non-elementary, where the first category are those whose subgraph only contains degree-1 and degree-2 check nodes. Empirical results have shown that often the most harmful trapping sets are elementary. In this letter, we derive a lower bound on the size of the smallest non-elementary trapping sets for a given b in variable-regular LDPC codes. The derived lower bound demonstrates that the size of the smallest possible non-elementary trapping set is, in general, larger than that of an elementary trapping set with the same b value. This provides a theoretical justification as to why non-elementary trapping sets are often not among the most harmful trapping sets.
In this paper, we study the graphical structure of elementary trapping sets (ETS) of variable-regular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. ETSs are known to be the main cause of error floor in LDPC coding schemes. For the set of LDPC codes with a given variable node degree dland girth g, we identify all the non-isomorphic structures of an arbitrary class of (a, b) ETSs, where a is the number of variable nodes and b is the number of odd-degree check nodes in the induced subgraph of the ETS. Our study leads to a simple characterization of dominant classes of ETSs (those with relatively small values of a and b) based on short cycles in the Tanner graph of the code. For such classes of ETSs, we prove that any set S in the class is a layered superset (LSS) of a short cycle, where the term “layered” is used to indicate that there is a nested sequence of ETSs that starts from the cycle and grows, one variable node at a time, to generate S. This characterization corresponds to a simple search algorithm that starts from the short cycles of the graph and finds all the ETSs with LSS property in a guaranteed fashion. Specific results on the structure of ETSs are presented for dl= 3, 4, 5, 6, g = 6, 8 and a, b ≤ 10. The results of this work can be used for the error floor analysis and for the design of LDPC codes with low error floors.