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A scaling law to predict the finite-length performance of spatially-coupled LDPC codes

Pablo M. Olmos

Published Jan 1, 2014• 46 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Spatially-coupled LDPC codes are known to have excellent asymptotic properties. Much less is known regarding their finite-length performance. We propose a scaling law to predict the error probability of finite-length spatially-coupled ensembles when transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. We discuss how the parameters of the scaling law are connected to fundamental quantities appearing in the asymptotic analysis of these ensembles and we verify that the predictions of the scaling law fit well to the data derived from simulations over a wide range of parameters. The ultimate goal of this line of research is to develop analytic tools for the design of spatially-coupled LDPC codes under practical constraints.

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Spatially-coupled LDPC codes are known to have excellent asymptotic properties. Much less is known regarding their finite-length performance. We propose a scaling law to predict the error probability of finite-length spatially-coupled ensembles when transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. We discuss how the parameters of the scaling law are connected to fundamental quantities appearing in the asymptotic analysis of these ensembles and we verify that the predictions of the scaling law fit well to the data derived from simulations over a wide range of parameters. The ultimate goal of this line of research is to develop analytic tools for the design of spatially-coupled LDPC codes under practical constraints.
Spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes are known to have excellent asymptotic properties. Much less is known regarding their finite-length performance. We propose a scaling law to predict the error probability of finite-length spatially coupled code ensembles when transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. We discuss how the parameters of the scaling law are connected to fundamental quantities appearing in the asymptotic analysis of these ensembles and we verify that the predictions of the scaling law fit well to the data derived from simulations over a wide range of parameters. The ultimate goal of this line of research is to develop analytic tools for the design of SC-LDPC codes under practical constraints.
We analyze the finite-length performance of spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes under window decoding over the binary erasure channel. In particular, we propose a refinement of the scaling law by Olmos and Urbanke for the frame error rate (FER) of terminated SC-LDPC ensembles under full belief propagation (BP) decoding. The refined scaling law models the decoding process as two independent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, in correspondence to the two decoding waves that propagate toward the center of the coupled chain for terminated SC-LDPC codes. We then extend the proposed scaling law to predict the performance of (terminated) SC-LDPC code ensembles under the more practical sliding window decoding. Finally, we extend this framework to predict the bit error rate (BER) and block error rate (BLER) of SC-LDPC code ensembles. The proposed scaling law yields very accurate predictions of the FER, BLER, and BER for both full BP and window decoding.
We investigate the finite-length scaling methodology for irregular LDPC code ensembles when transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel (BEC). We first show how the necessary computations, namely the covariance evolution and the computation of the finite-length shift, can be accomplished in the irregular case. We then investigate how the obtained approximation can be used to predict the performance of irregular code ensembles and to optimize the degree distributions for finite-length codes.
The finite-length performance of multi-edge spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes over the binary erasure channel (BEC) is analyzed. Existing scaling laws are extended to arbitrary protograph base matrices that include puncturing patterns and multiple edges between nodes. A regular protograph-based SC-LDPC construction based on the (4; 8)-regular LDPC block code works well in the waterfall region compared to more involved rate-1/2 structures proposed to improve the threshold to minimum distance trade-off. Scaling laws are also used for code design and to estimate the block length of a given SC-LDPC code ensemble to match the performance of some other code. Estimates on the performance degradation are developed if the chain length varies.
We analyze the asymptotic performance of non-binary spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes built on the general linear group, when the transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. We propose an efficient method to derive an upper bound to the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) threshold for nonbinary LDPC codes, and observe that the MAP performance of regular LDPC codes improves with the alphabet size. We then consider nonbinary SC-LDPC codes. We show that the same threshold saturation effect experienced by binary SC-LDPC codes occurs for the nonbinary codes, hence we conjecture that the BP threshold for large termination length approaches the MAP threshold of the underlying regular ensemble.