In this paper we present a novel two step design technique for Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, which, among the others, have been exploited for performance enhancement of the second generation of Digital Video Broadcasting- Satellite (DVB-S2). In the first step we develop an efficient algorithm for construction of quasi-random LDPC codes via minimization of a cost function related to the distribution of the length of cycles in the Tanner graph of the code. The cost function aims at constructing high girth bipartite graphs with reduced number of cycles of low length. In the second optimization step we aim at improving the asymptotic performance of the code via edge perturbation. The design philosophy is to avoid asymptotically weak LDPCs that have low minimum distance values and could potentially perform badly under iterative soft decoding at moderate to high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) values. Subsequently, we present sample results of our LDPC design strategy, present their simulated performance over an AWGN channel and make comparisons to some of the construction methods presented in the literature
In this paper we present a novel two step design technique for Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, which, among the others, have been exploited for performance enhancement of the second generation of Digital Video Broadcasting- Satellite (DVB-S2). In the first step we develop an efficient algorithm for construction of quasi-random LDPC codes via minimization of a cost function related to the distribution of the length of cycles in the Tanner graph of the code. The cost function aims at constructing high girth bipartite graphs with reduced number of cycles of low length. In the second optimization step we aim at improving the asymptotic performance of the code via edge perturbation. The design philosophy is to avoid asymptotically weak LDPCs that have low minimum distance values and could potentially perform badly under iterative soft decoding at moderate to high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) values. Subsequently, we present sample results of our LDPC design strategy, present their simulated performance over an AWGN channel and make comparisons to some of the construction methods presented in the literature
In this paper we present a novel two step design technique for Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, which, among the others, have been exploited for performance enhancement of the second generation of Digital Video Broadcasting- Satellite (DVB-S2). In the first step we develop an efficient algorithm for construction of quasi-random LDPC codes via minimization of a cost function related to the distribution of the length of cycles in the Tanner graph of the code. The cost function aims at constructing high girth bipartite graphs with reduced number of cycles of low length. In the second optimization step we aim at improving the asymptotic performance of the code via edge perturbation. The design philosophy is to avoid asymptotically weak LDPCs that have low minimum distance values and could potentially perform badly under iterative soft decoding at moderate to high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) values. Subsequently, we present sample results of our LDPC design strategy, present their simulated performance over an AWGN channel and make comparisons to some of the construction methods presented in the literature.
This paper,based on algebra and graph,proposes a method for constructing structured low-density parity-check(LDPC) codes.In this method,the authors design a connected graph with three kinds of special path to ensure that the Tanner graph of the parity check matrix mapped from the connected graph is without short cycles.The construction method results in two classes of(3,k)-regular quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with girth 8 and 12 respectively.Furthermore,by extending this construction method,two classes of LDPC codes with column weight 2,whose girths are respectively 16 and 24,can be obtained.The simulation studies show that these codes can achieve better performance than randomly constructed regular LDPC codes over AWGN channels with iterative decoding.At the BER of 10-5,the new proposed(3,6)-regular(4356,2205) QC-LDPC code performs 1.48dB from the Shannon limit.Moreover,it outperforms the random regular LDPC code of comparable parameters by 0.1dB.For the new proposed structured LDPC codes with column weight 2,they can achieve about 2dB coding gains with respect to the random regular LDPC codes with similar block lengths and code rates.
Short cycles in the Tanner graph of a given LDPC code has negative effect on the performance of iterative decoding. To improve the performance, we presented an approach for constructing Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check (QC-LDPC) codes whose associated Tanner graph has large girth and a small amount of short cycles. Each column block of the parity check matrix was designed by adding circulant permutation sub-matrices one after another, provided the current parity check matrix has minimal number of short cycles. The condition for the proposed QC-LDPC codes to have girth at least 6 was also analyzed. Regular and irregular QC-LDPC codes with various lengths and rates can be constructed. Simulations show that the proposed QC-LDPC codes have less short cycles and better performance than existing progressive edge growth based QC-LDPC codes.
Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been shown to have good error correcting performance approaching Shannon’s limit. Good error correcting performance enables efficient and reliable communication. However, a LDPC code decoding algorithm needs to be executed efficiently to meet cost, time, power and bandwidth requirements of target applications. The constructed codes should also meet error rate performance requirements of those applications. Since their rediscovery, there has been much research work on LDPC code construction and implementation. LDPC codes can be designed over a wide space with parameters such as girth, rate and length. There is no unique method of constructing LDPC codes. Existing construction methods are limited in some way in producing good error correcting performing and easily implementable codes for a given rate and length. There is a need to develop methods of constructing codes over a wide range of rates and lengths with good performance and ease of hardware implementability. LDPC code hardware design and implementation depend on the structure of target LDPC code and is also as varied as LDPC matrix designs and constructions. There are several factors to be considered including decoding algorithm computations,processing nodes interconnection network, number of processing nodes, amount of memory, number of quantization bits and decoding delay. All of these issues can be handled in several different ways. \nThis thesis is about construction of LDPC codes and their hardware implementation. LDPC code construction and implementation issues mentioned above are too many to be addressed in one thesis. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of LDPC code construction methods for some classes of structured LDPC codes and techniques for reducing decoding time. We introduce two main methods for constructing structured codes. In the first method, column-weight two LDPC codes are derived from distance graphs. A wide range of girths, rates and lengths are obtained compared to existing methods. The performance and implementation complexity of obtained codes depends on the structure of their corresponding distance graphs. In the second method, a search algorithm based on bit-filing and progressive-edge growth algorithms is introduced for constructing quasi-cyclic LDPC codes. The algorithm can be used to form a distance or Tanner graph of a code. This method could also obtain codes over a wide range of parameters. Cycles of length four are avoided by observing the row-column constraint. \nRow-column connections observing this condition are searched sequentially or randomly. Although the girth conditions are not sufficient beyond six, larger girths codes were easily obtained especially at low rates. The advantage of this algorithm compared to other methods is its flexibility. It could be used to construct codes for a given rate and length with girths of at least six for any sub-matrix configuration or rearrangement. The code size is also easily varied by increasing or decreasing sub-matrix size. Codes obtained using a sequential search criteria show poor performance at low girths (6 and 8) while random searches result in good performing codes. \nQuasi-cyclic codes could be implemented in a variety of decoder architectures. One of the many options is the choice of processing nodes interconnect. We show how quasi-cyclic codes processing could be scheduled through a multistage network. Although these net-works have more delay than other modes of communication, they offer more flexibility at a reasonable cost. Banyan and Benes networks are suggested as the most suitable networks. \nDecoding delay is also one of several issues considered in decoder design and implementation. In this thesis, we overlap check and variable node computations to reduce decoding time. Three techniques are discussed, two of which are introduced in this thesis. The techniques are code matrix permutation, matrix space restriction and sub-matrix row-column scheduling. Matrix permutation rearranges the parity-check matrix such that rows and columns that do not have connections in common are separated. This techniques can be applied to any matrix. Its effectiveness largely depends on the structure of the code. We show that its success also depends on the size of row and column weights. Matrix space restriction is another technique that can be applied to any code and has fixed reduction in time or amount of overlap. Its success depends on the amount of restriction and may be traded with performance loss. The third technique already suggested in literature relies on the internal cyclic structure of sub-matrices to achieve overlapping. The technique is limited to LDPC code matrices in which the number of sub-matrices is equal to row and column weights. We show that it can be applied to other codes with a lager number of sub-matrices than code weights. However, in this case maximum overlap is not guaranteed. We calculate the lower bound on the amount of overlapping. Overlapping could be applied to any sub-matrix configuration of quasi-cyclic codes by arbitrarily choosing \nthe starting rows for processing. Overlapping decoding time depends on inter-iteration waiting times. We show that there are upper bounds on waiting times which depend on the code weights. Waiting times could be further reduced by restricting shifts in identity sub-matrices or using smaller sub-matrices. This overlapping technique can reduce the decoding time by up to 50% compared to conventional message and computation scheduling. \nTechniques of matrix permutation and space restriction results in decoder architectures that are flexible in LDPC code design in terms of code weights and size. This is due to the fact that with these techniques, rows and columns are processed in sequential order to achieve overlapping. However, in the existing technique, all sub-matrices have to be processed in parallel to achieve overlapping. Parallel processing of all code sub-matrices requires the architecture to have the number of processing units at least equal to the number sub-matrices. Processing units and memory space should therefore be distributed among the sub-matrices according to the sub-matrices arrangement. This leads to high complexity or inflexibility in the decoder architecture. We propose a simple, programmable and high throughput decoder architecture based on matrix permutation and space restriction techniques.
After the introduction of iterative coding, Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes have received a lot of attention due to their remarkable near Shannon-limit performance and practical decoder implementation. However, when employing an LDPC code for various applications, multiple issues do arise at the simulation, algorithm and implementation levels. The first issue is the performance evaluation of the iterative LDPC decoder in the very low Bit Error Rate (BER) regions. So far, no analytical tool has been developed to evaluate the performance of LDPC codes. Unfortunately standard Monte Carlo (MC) simulations cannot be used for performance estimation in these low BER regions due to prohibitive execution times. The second issue is the efficiency of the decoding algorithm. Due to the presence of short cycles in the bipartite graph, sum-product decoding algorithms lead to considerable performance loss for short block-length LDPC codes and produce error floors for longer codes. In addition, the iterative processing and estimation of soft probabilistic values with these algorithms result in very high computational complexity, which in turn impedes the adoption of LDPC codes for power constrained systems. Another prime objective is to design a high throughput decoder architecture which is capable of supporting multiple rates and variable code lengths within minimal area.
This work aims to address and provide solutions to the above problems. As a solution to the performance estimation problem of LDPC codes, a highly efficient and novel fast BER simulation technique is developed. At the algorithm level, a performance improvement and error floor avoidance method is introduced, and a computationally efficient algorithm is developed for the sum-product decoding of LDPC codes. And finally, at the architecture level, a high throughput multi-rate variable code length implementation is presented which, when implemented, efficiently minimizes device resources while alleviating the routing complexity of the decoder.
This paper investigates the construction of random-structure LDPC (low-density parity-check) codes using Progressive Edge-Growth (PEG) algorithm and two proposed algorithms for removing short cycles (CB1 and CB2 algorithm; CB stands for Cycle Break). Progressive Edge-Growth is an algorithm for computer-based design of random-structure LDPC codes, the role of which is to generate a Tanner graph (a bipartite graph, which represents a parity-check matrix of an error-correcting channel code) with as few short cycles as possible. Short cycles, especially the shortest ones with a length of 4 edges, in Tanner graphs of LDPC codes can degrade the performance of their decoding algorithm, because after certain number of decoding iterations, the information sent through its edges is no longer independent. The main contribution of this paper is the unique approach to the process of removing short cycles in the form of CB2 algorithm, which erases edges from the code's parity-check matrix without decreasing the minimum Hamming distance of the code. The two cycle-removing algorithms can be used to improve the error-correcting performance of PEG-generated (or any other) LDPC codes and achieved results are provided. All these algorithms were used to create a PEG LDPC code which rivals the best-known PEG-generated LDPC code with similar parameters provided by one of the founders of LDPC codes. The methods for generating the mentioned error-correcting codes are described along with simulations which compare the error-correcting performance of the original codes generated by the PEG algorithm, the PEG codes processed by either CB1 or CB2 algorithm and also external PEG code published by one of the founders of LDPC codes