This paper presents a general approach for optimizing the number of symbols in increments (packets of incremental redundancy) in a feedback communication system with a limited number of increments. This approach is based on a tight normal approximation on the rate for successful decoding. Applying this approach to a variety of feedback systems using non-binary (NB) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes shows that greater than 90% of capacity can be achieved with average blocklengths fewer than 500 transmitted bits. One result is that the performance with ten increments closely approaches the performance with an infinite number of increments. The paper focuses on binary- input additive-white Gaussian noise (BI-AWGN) channels but also demonstrates that the normal approximation works well on examples of fading channels as well as high-SNR AWGN channels that require larger QAM constellations. The paper explores both variable-length feedback codes with termination (VLFT) and the more practical variable length feedback (VLF) codes without termination that require no assumption of noiseless transmitter confirmation. For VLF we consider both a two-phase scheme and CRC-based scheme.
Previous work showed that polar codes can be decoded using off-the-shelf LDPC decoders by imposing special constraints on the LDPC code structure, which, however, resulted in some performance degradation. In this paper we show that this loss can be mitigated; in particular, we demonstrate how the gap between LDPC-style decoding and Arikan's Belief Propagation (BP) decoding of polar codes can be closed by taking into account the underlying graph structure of the LDPC decoder while jointly designing the polar code and the parity-check matrix of the corresponding LDPC-like code. The resulting pol…
Spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes are sparse graph codes that have recently become of interest due to their capacity-approaching performance on memoryless binary input channels. In this paper, we unify all existing SC-LDPC code construction methods under a new generalized description of SC-LDPC codes based on algebraic lifts of graphs. We present an improved low-complexity counting method for the special case of $(3,3)$-absorbing sets for array-based SC-LDPC codes, which we then use to optimize permutation assignments in SC-LDPC code construction. We show that codes co…
We present a method for estimating the undetected error rate when a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is performed on the output of the decoder of short low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. This system is of interest for telecommand links, where new LDPC codes have been designed for updating the current standard. We show that these new LDPC codes combined with CRC are adequate for complying with the stringent requirements of this kind of transmissions in terms of error detection.
We propose a novel encoding/transmission scheme called continuous chain (CC) transmission that is able to improve the finite-length performance of a system using spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes. In CC transmission, instead of transmitting a sequence of independent codewords from a terminated SC-LDPC code chain, we connect multiple chains in a layered format, where encoding, transmission, and decoding are now performed in a continuous fashion. The connections between chains are created at specific points, chosen to improve the finite-length performance of the code str…
We consider the problem of transmitting correlated data after independent encoding to a central receiver through orthogonal channels. We assume that the channel state information is not known at the transmitter. The receiver has access to both the source correlation and the channel state information. We provide a generic framework for analyzing the performance of joint iterative decoding, using density evolution. Using differential evolution, we design punctured systematic LDPC codes to maximize the region of achievable channel conditions, with joint iterative decoding. The main contribution o…
In this paper, we analyze the finite-length performance of codes on graphs constructed by connecting spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) code chains. Successive (peeling) decoding is considered for the binary erasure channel (BEC). The evolution of the undecoded portion of the bipartite graph remaining after each iteration is analyzed as a dynamical system. When connecting short SC-LDPC chains, we show that, in addition to superior iterative decoding thresholds, connected chain ensembles have better finite-length performance than single chain ensembles of the same rate and len…
In this paper, we consider designing low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded modulation systems to achieve unequal error protection (UEP). We propose a new UEP approach by partial superposition transmission called UEP-by-PST. In the UEP-by-PST system, the information sequence is distinguished as two parts, the more important data (MID) and the less important data (LID), both of which are coded with LDPC codes. The codeword that corresponds to the MID is superimposed on the codeword that corresponds to the LID. The system performance can be analyzed by using discretized density evolution. Also pr…
In this paper, a novel transceiver architecture is proposed to simultaneously achieve efficient random access and reliable data transmission in massive IoT networks. At the transmitter side, each user is assigned a unique protocol sequence which is used to identify the user and also indicate the user's channel access pattern. Hence, user identification is completed by the detection of channel access patterns. Particularly, the columns of a parity check matrix of low-density-parity-check (LDPC) code are employed as protocol sequences. The design guideline of this LDPC parity check matrix and th…
In this paper, we formulate a new problem to cope with the transmission of extra bits over an existing coded transmission link (referred to as coded payload link) without any cost of extra transmission energy or extra bandwidth. This is possible since a gap to the channel capacity typically exists for a practical code. A new concept, termed as accessible capacity, is introduced to specify the maximum rate at which the superposition transmission of extra bits is reliable and has a negligible effect on the performance of the coded payload link. For a binary-input output-symmetric (BIOS) memoryle…
We design and assess some practical low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded transmission schemes for the Gaussian broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCC). This channel model is different from the classical wiretap channel model as the unauthorized receiver (Eve) must be able to decode some part of the information. Hence, the reliability and security targets are different from those of the wiretap channel. In order to design and assess practical coding schemes, we use the error rate as a metric of the performance achieved by the authorized receiver (Bob) and the unauthorized receiver (…
We consider transmission over a wiretap channel where both the main channel and the wiretapper's channel are Binary Erasure Channels (BEC). We use convolutional LDPC ensembles based on the coset encoding scheme. More precisely, we consider regular two edge type convolutional LDPC ensembles. We show that such a construction achieves the whole rate-equivocation region of the BEC wiretap channel. Convolutional LDPC ensemble were introduced by Felström and Zigangirov and are known to have excellent thresholds. Recently, Kudekar, Richardson, and Urbanke proved that the phenomenon of "Spatial Coupli…
Irregular low-density parity check (LDPC) codes are particularly well-suited for transmission schemes that require unequal error protection (UEP) of the transmitted data due to the different connection degrees of its variable nodes. However, this UEP capability is strongly dependent on the connection profile among the protection classes. This paper applies a multi-edge type analysis of LDPC codes for optimizing such connection profile according to the performance requirements of each protection class. This allows the construction of UEP-LDPC codes where the difference between the performance o…
We show how the iterative decoding threshold of tailbiting spatially coupled (SC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) code ensembles can be improved over the binary input additive white Gaussian noise channel by allowing the use of different transmission energies for the codeword bits. We refer to the proposed approach as energy shaping. We focus on the special case where the transmission energy of a bit is selected among two values, and where a contiguous portion of the codeword is transmitted with the largest one. Given these constraints, an optimal energy boosting policy is derived by means of …
Joint encryption-encoding schemes have been released to fulfill both reliability and security desires in a single step. Using Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes in joint encryption-encoding schemes, as an alternative to classical linear codes, would shorten the key size as well as improving error correction capability. In this article, we present a joint encryption-encoding scheme using Quasi Cyclic-Low Density Parity Check (QC-LDPC) codes based on finite geometry. We observed that our proposed scheme not only outperforms its predecessors in key size and transmission rate, but also remains …
We analyze the asymptotic performance of nonbinary 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…
This work investigates protograph-based LDPC codes for the AWGN channel with OOK modulation. A non-uniform distribution of the OOK modulation symbols is considered to improve the power efficiency especially for low SNRs. To this end, a specific transmitter architecture based on time sharing is proposed that allows probabilistic shaping of (some) OOK modulation symbols. Tailored protograph-based LDPC code designs outperform standard schemes with uniform signaling and off-the-shelf codes by 1.1 dB for a transmission rate of 0.25 bits/channel use.
We propose an approach for optimizing nonbinary (NB) quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes. This approach combines constructing of base parity-check matrices by simulated annealing and labeling the obtained base matrices aimed at maximizing the so-called generalized girth of the NB LDPC code Tanner graph. Tightened random coding bounds based on the average binary spectra for ensembles of "almost regular" NB LDPC codes of finite lengths over extensions of the binary Galois field are derived. The simulated FER performance of the sum-product BP decoding of "almost regular" NB QC-LDPC block codes are prese…
This paper deals with the problem of massive random access for Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC). We continue to investigate the coding scheme for Gaussian MAC proposed by A. Vem et al in 2017. The proposed scheme consists of four parts: (i) the data transmission is partitioned into time slots; (ii) the data, transmitted in each slot, is split into two parts, the first one set an interleaver of the low-density parity-check (LDPC) type code and is encoded by spreading sequence or codewords that are designed to be decoded by compressed sensing type decoding; (iii) the another part of transm…
We investigate the reasons behind the superior performance of belief propagation decoding of non-binary LDPC codes over their binary images when the transmission occurs over the binary erasure channel. We show that although decoding over the binary image has lower complexity, it has worse performance owing to its larger number of stopping sets relative to the original non-binary code. We propose a method to find redundant parity-checks of the binary image that eliminate these additional stopping sets, so that we achieve performance comparable to that of the original non-binary LDPC code with l…
We study incremental redundancy hybrid ARQ (IR-HARQ) schemes based on punctured, finite-length, LDPC codes. The transmission is assumed to take place over time varying binary erasure channels, such as mobile wireless channels at the applications layer. We analyze and optimize the throughput and delay performance of these IR-HARQ protocols under iterative, message-passing decoding. We derive bounds on the performance that are achievable by such schemes, and show that, with a simple extension, the iteratively decoded, punctured LDPC code based IR-HARQ protocol can be made rateless, and operating…
We consider spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes with finite smoothing parameters. A finite smoothing parameter is important for designing practical codes that are decoded using low-complexity windowed decoders. By optimizing the amount of coupling between spatial positions, we show that we can construct codes with improved decoding speed compared with conventional, uniform smoothing constructions. This leads to a significantly better performance under decoder complexity constraints while keeping the degree distribution regular. We optimize smoothing configurations using differenti…
We analyze nonbinary spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes built on the general linear group for transmission over the binary erasure channel. We prove threshold saturation of the belief propagation decoding to the potential threshold, by generalizing the proof technique based on potential functions recently introduced by Yedla et al.. The existence of the potential function is also discussed for a vector sparse system in the general case, and some existence conditions are developed. We finally give density evolution and simulation results for several nonbinary SC-LDPC cod…
We consider transmission over a wiretap channel where both the main channel and the wiretapper's channel are Binary Erasure Channels (BEC). We propose a code construction method using two edge type LDPC codes based on the coset encoding scheme. Using a standard LDPC ensemble with a given threshold over the BEC, we give a construction for a two edge type LDPC ensemble with the same threshold. If the given standard LDPC ensemble has degree two variable nodes, our construction gives rise to degree one variable nodes in the code used over the main channel. This results in zero threshold over the m…
The McEliece cryptosystem is a public-key cryptosystem based on coding theory that has successfully resisted cryptanalysis for thirty years. The original version, based on Goppa codes, is able to guarantee a high level of security, and is faster than competing solutions, like RSA. Despite this, it has been rarely considered in practical applications, due to two major drawbacks: i) large size of the public key and ii) low transmission rate. Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes are state-of-art forward error correcting codes that permit to approach the Shannon limit while ensuring limited compl…
Binary LDPC coded relay systems have been well studied previously with the assumption of infinite codeword length. In this paper, we deal with non-binary LDPC codes which can outperform their binary counterpart especially for practical codeword length. We utilize non-binary LDPC codes and recently invented non-binary coding techniques known as multiplicative repetition to design the low-rate coding strategy for the decode-and-forward half-duplex relay channel. We claim that the proposed strategy is simple since the destination and the relay can decode with almost the same computational complex…
Low density parity check (LDPC) lattices are obtained from Construction D' and a family of nested binary LDPC codes. We consider an special case of these lattices with one binary LDPC code as underlying code. This special case of LDPC lattices can be obtained by lifting binary LDPC codes using Construction A lattices. The LDPC lattices were the first family of lattices which have efficient decoding in high dimensions. We employ the encoding and decoding of the LDPC lattices in a cooperative transmission framework. We establish two efficient shaping methods based on hypercube shaping and Vorono…
We study the performance of binary spatially-coupled low-density parity-check codes (SC-LDPC) when used with bit-interleaved coded-modulation (BICM) schemes. This paper considers the cases when transmission takes place over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN)channels and Rayleigh fast-fading channels. The technique of upper bounding the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) decoding performance of LDPC codes using an area theorem is extended for BICM schemes. The upper bound is computed for both the optimal MAP demapper and the suboptimal max-log-MAP (MLM) demapper. It is observed that this bound approa…
We derive the density evolution equations for non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) ensembles when transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. We introduce ensembles defined with respect to the general linear group over the binary field. For these ensembles the density evolution equations can be written compactly. The density evolution for the general linear group helps us in understanding the density evolution for codes defined with respect to finite fields. We compute thresholds for different alphabet sizes for various LDPC ensembles. Surprisingly, the threshold is not a m…
LDPC code design tools typically rely on asymptotic code behavior and are affected by an unavoidable performance degradation due to model imperfections in the short length regime. We propose an LDPC code design scheme based on an evolutionary algorithm, the Genetic Algorithm (GenAlg), implementing a "decoder-in-the-loop" concept. It inherently takes into consideration the channel, code length and the number of iterations while optimizing the error-rate of the actual decoder hardware architecture. We construct short length LDPC codes (i.e., the parity-check matrix) with error-rate performance c…
Protograph-based Raptor-like low-density parity-check codes (PBRL codes) are a recently proposed family of easily encodable and decodable rate-compatible LDPC (RC-LDPC) codes. These codes have an excellent iterative decoding threshold and performance across all design rates. PBRL codes designed thus far, for both long and short block-lengths, have been based on optimizing the iterative decoding threshold of the protograph of the RC code family at various design rates. In this work, we propose a design method to obtain better quasi-cyclic (QC) RC-LDPC codes with PBRL structure for short block-l…
The goal of the paper is to study specific properties of nonbinary low-density parity-check (NB LDPC) codes when used in coded modulation systems. The paper is focused on the practically important NB LDPC codes over extensions of the Galois field GF$(2^m)$ with $m \le 6$ used with QAM signaling. Performance of NB QC LDPC coded transmission strongly depends on mapping of nonbinary symbols to signal constellation points. We obtain a random coding bound on the maximum-likelihood decoding error probability for an ensemble of random irregular NB LDPC codes used with QAM signaling for specific symbo…
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 g…
Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is an emerging paradigm for efficient enabling of massive connectivity in future machine-type communications (MTC). In this letter, we conceive the uplink transmissions of the low-density parity check (LDPC) coded SCMA system. Traditional receiver design of LDPC-SCMA system, which is based on message passing algorithm (MPA) for multiuser detection followed by individual LDPC decoding, may suffer from the drawback of the high complexity and large decoding latency, especially when the system has large codebook size and/or high overloading factor. To address thi…
In this paper we are concerned with the asymptotic analysis of nonbinary spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) ensembles defined over GL$\left(2^{m}\right)$ (the general linear group of degree $m$ over GF$\left(2\right)$). Our purpose is to prove threshold saturation when the transmission takes place on the binary erasure channel (BEC). To this end, we establish the duality rule for entropy for nonbinary variable-node (VN) and check-node (CN) convolutional operators to accommodate the nonbinary density evolution (DE) analysis. Based on this, we construct the explicit forms of th…
Spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes can achieve the channel capacity under low-complexity belief propagation (BP) decoding, however, there is a non-negligible rate-loss because of termination effects for practical finite coupling lengths. In this paper, we study how we can approach the performance of terminated SC-LDPC codes by random shortening of tail-biting SC-LDPC codes. We find the minimum required rate-loss in order to achieve the same performance than terminated codes. We additionally study the use of tail-biting SC-LDPC codes for transmission over parallel channe…
Spatially-Coupled LDPC (SC-LDPC) ensembles achieve the capacity of binary memoryless channels (BMS), asymptotically, under belief-propagation (BP) decoding. In this paper, we study the BP decoding of these code ensembles over a BMS channel and in the presence of a single random burst of erasures. We show that in the limit of code length, codewords can be recovered successfully if the length of the burst is smaller than some maximum recoverable burst length. We observe that the maximum recoverable burst length is practically the same if the transmission takes place over binary erasure channel o…
In this paper we present regular bilayer LDPC convolutional codes for half-duplex relay channels. For the binary erasure relay channel, we prove that the proposed code construction achieves the capacities for the source-relay link and the source-destination link provided that the channel conditions are known when designing the code. Meanwhile, this code enables the highest transmission rate with decode-and-forward relaying. In addition, its regular degree distributions can easily be computed from the channel parameters, which significantly simplifies the code optimization. Numerical results ar…
A sequential updating scheme (SUS) for belief propagation (BP) decoding of LDPC codes over Galois fields, $GF(q)$, and correlated Markov sources is proposed, and compared with the standard parallel updating scheme (PUS). A thorough experimental study of various transmission settings indicates that the convergence rate, in iterations, of the BP algorithm (and subsequently its complexity) for the SUS is about one half of that for the PUS, independent of the finite field size $q$. Moreover, this 1/2 factor appears regardless of the correlations of the source and the channel's noise model, while t…
We introduce the Scattered Extrinsic Information Transfer (S-EXIT) chart as a tool for optimizing degree profiles of short length Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes under iterative decoding. As degree profile optimization is typically done in the asymptotic length regime, there is space for further improvement when considering the finite length behavior. We propose to consider the average extrinsic information as a random variable, exploiting its specific distribution properties for guiding code design. We explain, step-by-step, how to generate an S-EXIT chart for short-length LDPC codes. W…
This paper considers the problem of source coding with side information at the decoder, also called Slepian-Wolf source coding scheme. In practical applications of this coding scheme, the statistical relation between the source and the side information can vary from one data transmission to another, and there is a need to adapt the coding rate depending on the current statistical relation. In this paper, we propose a novel rate-adaptive code construction based on LDPC codes for the Slepian-Wolf source coding scheme. The proposed code design method allows to optimize the code degree distributio…
Unequal transition probabilities between input and output symbols, input power constraints, or input symbols of unequal durations can lead to non-uniform capacity achieving input distributions for communication channels. Using uniform input distributions reduces the achievable rate, which is called the shaping gap. Gallager's idea for reliable communication with zero shaping gap is to do encoding, matching, and jointly decoding and dematching. In this work, a scheme is proposed that consists in matching, encoding, decoding, and dematching. Only matching is channel specific whereas coding is no…
This work proposes a tractable estimation of the maximum a posteriori (MAP) threshold of various families of sparse-graph code ensembles, by using an approximation for the extended belief propagation generalized extrinsic information transfer (EBP-GEXIT) function, first proposed by Measson et al. We consider the transmission over non-binary complex-input additive white Gaussian noise channel and extend the existing results to obtain an expression for the GEXIT function. We estimate the MAP threshold by applying the Maxwell construction to the obtained approximate EBP-GEXIT charts for various f…
Channel coding aims to minimize errors that occur during the transmission of digital information from one place to another. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can detect and correct transmission errors if one encodes the original information by adding redundant bits. In practice, heuristic iterative decoding algorithms are used to decode the received vector. However, these algorithms may fail to decode if the received vector contains multiple errors. We consider decoding the received vector with minimum error as an integer programming problem and propose a branch-and-price method for its so…
Spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes show an outstanding performance under the low-complexity belief propagation (BP) decoding algorithm. They exhibit a peculiar convergence phenomenon above the BP threshold of the underlying non-coupled ensemble, with a wave-like convergence propagating through the spatial dimension of the graph, allowing to approach the MAP threshold. We focus on this particularly interesting regime in between the BP and MAP thresholds. On the binary erasure channel, it has been proved that the information propagates with a constant speed toward the successful de…
We consider spatially coupled low-density parity-check codes with finite smoothing parameters. A finite smoothing parameter is important for designing practical codes that are decoded using low-complexity windowed decoders. By optimizing the amount of coupling between spatial positions, we show that we can construct codes with excellent thresholds and small rate loss, even with the lowest possible smoothing parameter and large variable node degrees, which are required for low error floors. We also establish that the decoding convergence speed is faster with non-uniformly coupled codes, which w…
This paper investigates the bit-interleaved coded generalized spatial modulation (BICGSM) with iterative decoding (BICGSM-ID) for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) visible light communications (VLC). In the BICGSM-ID scheme, the information bits conveyed by the signal-domain (SiD) symbols and the spatial-domain (SpD) light emitting diode (LED)-index patterns are coded by a protograph low-density parity-check (P-LDPC) code. Specifically, we propose a signal-domain symbol expanding and re-allocating (SSER) method for constructing a type of novel generalized spatial modulation (GSM) constella…
The asymptotic iterative decoding performances of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes using min-sum (MS) and sum-product (SP) decoding algorithms on memoryless binary-input output-symmetric (MBIOS) channels are analyzed in this paper. For MS decoding, the analysis is done by upper bounding the bit error probability of the root bit of a tree code by the sequence error probability of a subcode of the tree code assuming the transmission of the all-zero codeword. The result is a recursive upper bound on the bit error probability after each iteration. For SP decoding, we derive a recursively dete…
This work considers optimizing LDPC codes in the physical-layer network coded two-way relay channel using noncoherent FSK modulation. The error-rate performance of channel decoding at the relay node during the multiple-access phase was improved through EXIT-based optimization of Tanner graph variable node degree distributions. Codes drawn from the DVB-S2 and WiMAX standards were used as a basis for design and performance comparison. The computational complexity characteristics of the standard codes were preserved in the optimized codes by maintaining the extended irregular repeat-accumulate (e…
The theoretic results of MIMO capacity tell us that the higher the number of antennas are employed, the higher the transmission rate is. This makes MIMO systems with hundreds of antennas very attractive but one of the major problems that obstructs such large dimensional MIMO systems from the practical realization is a high complexity of the MIMO detector. We present in this paper the new soft output MIMO detector based on matched filtering that can be applied to the large MIMO systems which are coded by the powerful non-binary LDPC codes. The per-bit complexity of the proposed detector is just…
A noncoherent two-way relaying system is developed using physical-layer network coding for improved throughput over conventional relaying in a fading channel. Energy-efficient noncoherent operation is achieved using multitone frequency shift keying (FSK). A novel soft-output demodulator is developed for the relay, and corresponding achievable exchange rates are found for Rayleigh fading and AWGN channels. Bit-error rate performance approaching the achievable rate is realized using a capacity-approaching channel code and a receiver architecture that iterates between demodulation and channel dec…
Assuming iterative decoding for binary erasure channels (BECs), a novel tree-based technique for upper bounding the bit error rates (BERs) of arbitrary, finite low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is provided and the resulting bound can be evaluated for all operating erasure probabilities, including both the waterfall and the error floor regions. This upper bound can also be viewed as a narrowing search of stopping sets, which is an approach different from the stopping set enumeration used for lower bounding the error floor. When combined with optimal leaf-finding modules, this upper bound is…
Digital data transfer can be protected by means of suitable error correcting codes. Among the families of state-of-the-art codes, LDPC (Low Density Parity-Check) codes have received a great deal of attention recently, because of their performance and flexibility of operation, in wireless and mobile radio channels, as well as in cable transmission systems. In this paper, we present a class of rate-adaptive LDPC codes, obtained as properly punctured simplex codes. These codes allow for the use of an efficient soft-decision decoding algorithm, provided that a condition called row-column constrain…
A low-complexity soft-decision concatenated FEC scheme, consisting of an inner LDPC code and an outer staircase code is proposed. The inner code is tasked with reducing the bit error probability below the outer-code threshold. The concatenated code is obtained by optimizing the degree distribution of the inner-code ensemble to minimize estimated data-flow, for various choices of outer staircase codes. A key feature that emerges from this optimization is that it pays to leave some inner codeword bits completely uncoded, thereby greatly reducing a significant portion of the decoding complexity. …
