IEEE Transactions on Communications
A Threshold-Based Binary Message Passing Decoder With Memory for Product Codes
Xinwei Zhao, Shancheng Zhao, Qingyong Deng, Zhetao Li, Xiaohu Tang
Abstract
Product codes (PCs) are typically decoded using iterative bounded distance decoding (iBDD) to ensure a low decoding complexity. To obtain further performance gain, a soft-aided decoding algorithm, termed the iBDD with scaled reliability (iBDD-SR), was proposed for PCs. In this paper, we propose an enhanced iBDD-SR by introducing threshold and memory when passing messages between the component decoders. The resulting algorithm is referred to as the threshold-based binary message passing (TB-BMP) with memory. In the proposed decoding algorithm, the soft reliability of the BDD output at the current half-iteration is a weighted sum of the BDD output, the channel reliability, and the content of the memory unit, where the content of the memory unit at the current half-iteration is related to the selected threshold and the BDD output at last half-iteration. Due to the existence of memory, the Bayesian network is used to model the decoding process of the TB-BMP. Based on the Bayesian network, we derive the density evolution (DE) equations for the TB-BMP under the constraint of extrinsic message passing (EMP). The analytical results of the DE analysis can be used to guide the selection of the parameters of the TB-BMP decoder. Extensive simulation results show that the TB-BMP decoder outperforms the iBDD-SR over the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (Bi-AWGN) channels. In particular, for a PC based on a two-error-correcting extended Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) code of length 256, the TB-BMP decoder performs about 0.28 dB better than the iBDD-SR at a bit error rate (BER) of 10-7.