Improved Maximum-Likelihood Decoding Using Sparse Parity-Check Matrices
Florian Gensheimer, Tobias Dietz, Stefan Ruzika, Kira Kraft, Norbert Wehn
Abstract
Maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding is an important and powerful method in communications to obtain the optimal performance of a channel code. However, ML decoding is a challenging problem whose complexity grows exponentially with the blocklength of the code, making it unfeasible to decode optimally for large codes. In this paper, we present a new approach to accelerate ML decoding by minimizing the number of ones in the code's underlying matrix representation. We formulate this minimization problem as an integer program and use a heuristic algorithm to solve it. Using these minimized matrices, we significantly reduce the runtime of different ML decoders for various codes, resulting in speedups of up to 81% compared to the runtime on the original matrices.