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IEEE Transactions on Communications

Designing Protograph-Based Quasi-Cyclic Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes With Large Girth

Shiyuan Mo, Li Chen, Daniel J. Costello, David G. M. Mitchell, Roxana Smarandache, Jie Qiu

Published Jun 9, 2020• 28 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Spatially coupled (SC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can achieve capacity approaching performance with low message recovery latency when using sliding window (SW) decoding. An SC-LDPC code constructed from a protograph can be generated by first coupling a chain of block protographs and then lifting the coupled protograph using permutation matrices. In this paper, we introduce a systematic design to eliminate 4-cycles in a coupled protograph. Further using a quasi-cyclic (QC) lifting, we introduce a procedure for constructing QC-SC-LDPC codes of girth at least eight. This can be interpreted as a multi-stage graph lifting process that yields a greater flexibility in designing QC-SC-LDPC codes with a large girth than previous approaches. Simulation results show the design leads to improved decoding performance, particularly in the error floor, compared to random constructions. Finally, we determine the minimum coupling width required to eliminate 4-cycles in a coupled protograph.

DOI
10.1109/tcomm.2020.3001029

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Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes based on protographs are of great interest to code designers because analysis and implementation are facilitated by the protograph structure and the use of circulant permutation matrices for protograph lifting. However, these restrictions impose undesirable fixed upper limits on important code parameters, such as minimum distance and girth. In this paper, we consider an approach to constructing QC-LDPC codes that uses a two-step lifting procedure based on a protograph, and, by following this method instead of the usual one-step procedure, we obtain improved minimum distance and girth properties. We also present two new design rules for constructing good QC-LDPC codes using this two-step lifting procedure, and in each case we obtain a significant increase in minimum distance and achieve a certain guaranteed girth compared to one-step circulant-based liftings. The expected performance improvement is verified by simulation results.

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Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes based on protographs are of great interest to code designers because analysis and implementation are facilitated by the protograph structure and the use of circulant permutation matrices for protograph lifting. However, these restrictions impose undesirable fixed upper limits on important code parameters, such as minimum distance and girth. In this paper, we consider an approach to constructing QC-LDPC codes that uses a two-step lifting procedure based on a protograph, and, by following this method instead of the usual one-step procedure, we obtain improved minimum distance and girth properties. We also present two new design rules for constructing good QC-LDPC codes using this two-step lifting procedure, and in each case, we obtain a significant increase in minimum distance and achieve a certain guaranteed girth compared with one-step circulant-based liftings. The expected performance improvement is verified by simulation results.

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory•Jul 24, 2014•53 citations
Spatially coupled (SC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can achieve capacity approaching performance with low message recovery latency when using sliding window (SW) decoding. An SC-LDPC code constructed from a protograph can be generated by first coupling a chain of block protographs and then lifting the coupled protograph using permutation matrices. In this paper, we introduce a systematic design to eliminate 4-cycles in a coupled protograph. Further using a quasi-cyclic (QC) lifting, we introduce a procedure for constructing QC-SC-LDPC codes of girth at least eight. This can be interpreted as a multi-stage graph lifting process that yields a greater flexibility in designing QC-SC-LDPC codes with a large girth than previous approaches. Simulation results show the design leads to improved decoding performance, particularly in the error floor, compared to random constructions. Finally, we determine the minimum coupling width required to eliminate 4-cycles in a coupled protograph.
Spatially coupled (SC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can achieve capacity approaching performance with low message recovery latency when using sliding window (SW) decoding. An SC-LDPC code constructed from a protograph can be generated by first coupling a chain of block protographs and then lifting the coupled protograph using permutation matrices. This paper introduces a systematic design of SC-LDPC codes to eliminate 4-cycles in the coupled photograph. Using a quasi-cyclic (QC) lifting, we obtain QC-SC-LDPC codes of girth at least eight. Coupling a chain of block protographs implies spreading edges from one protograph to the others. Our protograph-based design can be viewed as guiding the edge spreading and also the graph-lifting process. Simulation results show the design leads to improved decoding performance, particularly in the error floor, compared to random designs.
In this paper, we deal with time-varing quasi-cyclic (QC) spatially-coupled (SC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes by lifting the coupled protographs. The construction method of girth-6 protographs for any code rate is proposed. We provide a theoretical lower bound on the syndrome former constraint length under condition of the protographs without 4-cycles in their Tanner graphs. Then we use periodic QC lifting method to search the QC-SC-LDPC matrices with larger girth based on the protographs. The minimum dimension size of QC-SC-LDPC codes is given to count the girth of QC-SC-LDPC codes with a semi- infinite binary-check matrix structure. The performance of such constructed codes with lower complexity and delay is superior to the LDPC block codes.
Quasi-Cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are a class of LDPC codes with a simple construction facilitating hardware implementation while achieving excellent performance. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm that constructs QC spatially-coupled (SC) LDPC codes with large girth while keeping the constraint length small. The algorithm offers a "protograph to basegraph" construction, focusing on finding small lifting sizes of QC codes while avoiding short cycles. This work extends the hierarchical quasi-cyclic (HQC) construction for block LDPC codes proposed by Wang et al. to the spatially coupled case. The construction is based on the cycle relevant matrix (CRM) derived from the periodic structure of time-invariant SC-LDPC codes. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm effectively achieves the target girth with a small lifting factor, enabling low-complexity SC code construction.
Small cycles in spatially coupled low-density paritycheck (SC-LDPC) codes have a detrimental effect on the error floor. Recently, an explicit simple method has been proposed to construct a class of 4-cycle free SC-LDPC codes by partitioning a spreading matrix into a number of component matrices. Using a quasi-cyclic (QC) lifting, we propose a component matrices construction method to obtain QC-SC-LDPC codes with a girth eight in this paper. The component matrices of the new method are completely defined by a spreading matrix and an exponent matrix. The spreading matrix is constructed from a finite sequence of integers, and the exponent matrix is constructed from the greatest common divisor (GCD) framework. The novel construction method demonstrates the capacity to entirely eliminate 6-cycles. Compared to the recently proposed explicit structural design, the proposed code achieves a girth of eight and exhibits better bit-error rate (BER) performance.
Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes based on protographs are of great interest to code designers because analysis and implementation are facilitated by the protograph structure and the use of circulant permutation matrices for protograph lifting. However, these restrictions impose undesirable fixed upper limits on important code parameters, such as minimum distance and girth. In this paper, we consider an approach to constructing QC-LDPC codes that uses a two-step lifting procedure based on a protograph, and, by following this method instead of the usual one-step procedure, we obtain improved minimum distance and girth properties. We also present two new design rules for constructing good QC-LDPC codes using this two-step lifting procedure, and in each case we obtain a significant increase in minimum distance and achieve a certain guaranteed girth compared to one-step circulant-based liftings. The expected performance improvement is verified by simulation results.
Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes based on protographs are of great interest to code designers because analysis and implementation are facilitated by the protograph structure and the use of circulant permutation matrices for protograph lifting. However, these restrictions impose undesirable fixed upper limits on important code parameters, such as minimum distance and girth. In this paper, we consider an approach to constructing QC-LDPC codes that uses a two-step lifting procedure based on a protograph, and, by following this method instead of the usual one-step procedure, we obtain improved minimum distance and girth properties. We also present two new design rules for constructing good QC-LDPC codes using this two-step lifting procedure, and in each case, we obtain a significant increase in minimum distance and achieve a certain guaranteed girth compared with one-step circulant-based liftings. The expected performance improvement is verified by simulation results.