IEEE Transactions on Communications

Error Floor Estimation of LDPC Coded Modulation Systems Using Importance Sampling

Peyman Neshaastegaran, Amir H. Banihashemi, Ramy H. Gohary

Published Feb 9, 2021• 7 citations

Abstract

One of the key weaknesses of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is the error floor that they typically exhibit at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Such an error floor is usually attributed to problematic structures known as trapping sets (TSs). The overwhelming majority of existing error floor estimation schemes consider the case of binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signalling. Unfortunately, these schemes are not readily extensible to estimate the error floor of high order LDPC coded modulation systems considered herein. To provide such a scheme, in this work, we use mean-shift importance sampling (MS-IS) to develop a novel error floor estimation methodology for high-order pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) LDPC coded systems. First, a computationally efficient graphical-based approach is used to identify the TSs of a given LDPC code. Subsequently, a novel analytical approach is devised to identify the TSs that are likely to have a higher contribution in the error floor. These TSs are referred to as potentially dominant TSs (PDTSs). Finally, a new methodology for categorizing the PDTSs into equivalence classes is developed. A representative PDTS of each equivalence class is chosen and an MS-IS framework is devised to obtain the error rate corresponding to each equivalence class. To arrive at the desired MS-IS scheme, we develop an algorithm that invokes the geometry of the constellation to determine the MS value. In contrast with the conventional MS-IS method used in BPSK signalling, in the proposed MS-IS scheme, the MS value is a variable that is determined based on the TS and the transmitted codeword. The computational complexity of the three main steps of our methodology, viz. extracting the PDTSs, determining the MS values, and applying the MS-IS scheme, depends merely on the size of the constellation and the structure of the code, but not on the SNR. Numerical simulations confirm the efficacy and accuracy of the proposed technique at different SNRs.

DOI: 10.1109/tcomm.2021.3057625

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