Low decoding latency and complexity are two important requirements of channel codes used in many applications, like machine-to-machine communications. In this paper, we show how these requirements can be fulfilled by using some special quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check block codes and spatially coupled low-density parity-check convolutional codes that we denote as compact. They are defined by parity-check matrices designed according to a recent approach based on sequentially multiplied columns. This method allows obtaining codes with girth up to 12. Many numerical examples of practical codes are provided.
Low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes are capable of achieving excellent performance with low encoding and decoding complexity. In this paper we discuss several graph-cover-based methods for deriving families of time-invariant and time-varying LDPC convolutional codes from LDPC block codes and show how earlier proposed LDPC convolutional code constructions can be presented within this framework. Some of the constructed convolutional codes significantly outperform the underlying LDPC block codes. We investigate some possible reasons for this "convolutional gain," and we also discu…
In this paper, we present a construction method of non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes. Our construction method is an extension of Felstroem and Zigangirov construction for non-binary LDPC convolutional codes. The rate-compatibility of the non-binary convolutional code is also discussed. The proposed rate-compatible code is designed from one single mother (2,4)-regular non-binary LDPC convolutional code of rate 1/2. Higher-rate codes are produced by puncturing the mother code and lower-rate codes are produced by multiplicatively repeating the mother code. Simulation …
LDPC convolutional codes have been shown to be capable of achieving the same capacity-approaching performance as LDPC block codes with iterative message-passing decoding. In this paper, asymptotic methods are used to calculate a lower bound on the free distance for several ensembles of asymptotically good protograph-based LDPC convolutional codes. Further, we show that the free distance to constraint length ratio of the LDPC convolutional codes exceeds the minimum distance to block length ratio of corresponding LDPC block codes.
In this paper asymptotic methods are used to form lower bounds on the free distance to constraint length ratio of several ensembles of regular, asymptotically good, protograph-based LDPC convolutional codes. In particular, we show that the free distance to constraint length ratio of the regular LDPC convolutional codes exceeds that of the minimum distance to block length ratio of the corresponding LDPC block codes.
We propose a low-complexity method to find quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check block codes with girth 10 or 12 and shorter length than those designed through classical approaches. The method is extended to time-invariant spatially coupled low-density parity-check convolutional codes, permitting to achieve small syndrome former constraint lengths. Several numerical examples are given to show its effectiveness.
In this paper, we present a method of constructing new families of LDPC block code ensembles formed by terminating irregular protograph-based LDPC convolutional codes. Using the accumulate-repeat-by-4-jagged-accumulate (AR4JA) protograph as an example, a density evolution analysis for the binary erasure channel shows that this flexible design technique gives rise to a large selection of LDPC block code ensembles with varying code rates and thresholds close to capacity. Further, by means of an asymptotic weight enumerator analysis, we show that all the ensembles in this family also have minimum…
It has previously been shown that ensembles of terminated protograph-based low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes have a typical minimum distance that grows linearly with block length and that they are capable of achieving capacity approaching iterative decoding thresholds on the binary erasure channel (BEC). In this paper, we review a recent result that the dramatic threshold improvement obtained by terminating LDPC convolutional codes extends to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Also, using a (3,6)-regular protograph-based LDPC convolutional code ensemble as an e…
An ensemble of LDPC convolutional codes with parity-check matrices composed of permutation matrices is considered. The convergence of the iterative belief propagation based decoder for terminated convolutional codes in the ensemble is analyzed for binary-input output-symmetric memoryless channels using density evolution techniques. We observe that the structured irregularity in the Tanner graph of the codes leads to significantly better thresholds when compared to corresponding LDPC block codes.
We consider a windowed decoding scheme for LDPC convolutional codes that is based on the belief-propagation (BP) algorithm. We discuss the advantages of this decoding scheme and identify certain characteristics of LDPC convolutional code ensembles that exhibit good performance with the windowed decoder. We will consider the performance of these ensembles and codes over erasure channels with and without memory. We show that the structure of LDPC convolutional code ensembles is suitable to obtain performance close to the theoretical limits over the memoryless erasure channel, both for the BP dec…
In this paper, we deal with time-invariant spatially coupled low-density parity-check convolutional codes (SC-LDPC-CCs). Classic design approaches usually start from quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) block codes and exploit suitable unwrapping procedures to obtain SC-LDPC-CCs. We show that the direct design of the SC-LDPC-CCs syndrome former matrix or, equivalently, the symbolic parity-check matrix, leads to codes with smaller syndrome former constraint lengths with respect to the best solutions available in the literature. We provide theoretical lower bounds on the syndrome form…
In this paper, we propose a non-uniform windowed decoder for multi-dimensional spatially-coupled LDPC (MD-SC-LDPC) codes over the binary erasure channel. An MD-SC-LDPC code is constructed by connecting together several SC-LDPC codes into one larger code that provides major benefits over a variety of channel models. In general, SC codes allow for low-latency windowed decoding. While a standard windowed decoder can be naively applied, such an approach does not fully utilize the unique structure of MD-SC-LDPC codes. In this paper, we propose and analyze a novel non-uniform decoder to provide more…
Ensembles of (J,K)-regular low-density parity-check convolutional (LDPCC) codes are known to be asymptotically good, in the sense that the minimum free distance grows linearly with the constraint length. In this paper, we use a protograph-based analysis of terminated LDPCC codes to obtain an upper bound on the free distance growth rate of ensembles of periodically time-varying LDPCC codes. This bound is compared to a lower bound and evaluated numerically. It is found that, for a sufficiently large period, the bounds coincide. This approach is then extended to obtain bounds on the trapping set …
Message-passing iterative decoders for low-density parity-check (LDPC) block codes are known to be subject to decoding failures due to so-called pseudo-codewords. These failures can cause the large signal-to-noise ratio performance of message-passing iterative decoding to be worse than that predicted by the maximum-likelihood decoding union bound. In this paper we address the pseudo-codeword problem from the convolutional-code perspective. In particular, we compare the performance of LDPC convolutional codes with that of their ``wrapped'' quasi-cyclic block versions and we show that the minimu…
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…
This paper presents a design technique for obtaining regular time-invariant low-density parity-check convolutional (RTI-LDPCC) codes with low complexity and good performance. We start from previous approaches which unwrap a low-density parity-check (LDPC) block code into an RTI-LDPCC code, and we obtain a new method to design RTI-LDPCC codes with better performance and shorter constraint length. Differently from previous techniques, we start the design from an array LDPC block code. We show that, for codes with high rate, a performance gain and a reduction in the constraint length are achieved…
In this paper, we compare the finite-length performance of protograph-based spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes and LDPC block codes (LDPC-BCs) over GF(q). In order to reduce computational complexity and latency, a sliding window decoder with a stopping rule based on a soft bit-error-rate (BER) estimate is used for the q-ary SC-LDPC codes. Two regimes are considered: one when the constraint length of q-ary SC-LDPC codes is equal to the block length of q-ary LDPC-BCs and the other when the two decoding latencies are equal. Simulation results confirm that, in both regimes,…
In this paper we consider the generalization of binary spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes to finite fields GF$(q)$, $q\geq 2$, and develop design rules for $q$-ary SC-LDPC code ensembles based on their iterative belief propagation (BP) decoding thresholds, with particular emphasis on low-latency windowed decoding (WD). We consider transmission over both the binary erasure channel (BEC) and the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel (BIAWGNC) and present results for a variety of $(J,K)$-regular SC-LDPC code ensembles constructed over GF$(q)$ using protographs…
Let H(D) be the parity-check matrix of an LDPC convolutional code corresponding to the parity-check matrix H of a QC code obtained using the method of Tanner et al. We see that the entries in H(D) are all monomials and several rows (columns) have monomial factors. Let us cyclically shift the rows of H. Then the parity-check matrix H'(D) corresponding to the modified matrix H' defines another convolutional code. However, its free distance is lower-bounded by the minimum distance of the original QC code. Also, each row (column) of H'(D) has a factor different from the one in H(D). We show that t…
Braided convolutional codes (BCCs) are a class of spatially coupled turbo-like codes that can be described by a $(2,3)$-regular compact graph. In this paper, we introduce a family of $(d_v,d_c)$-regular GLDPC codes with convolutional code constraints (CC-GLDPC codes), which form an extension of classical BCCs to arbitrary regular graphs. In order to characterize the performance in the waterfall and error floor regions, we perform an analysis of the density evolution thresholds as well as the finite-length ensemble weight enumerators and minimum distances of the ensembles. In particular, we con…
Spatially coupled codes have been shown to universally achieve the capacity for a large class of channels. Many variants of such codes have been introduced to date. We discuss a further such variant that is particularly simple and is determined by a very small number of parameters. More precisely, we consider time-invariant low-density convolutional codes with very large constraint lengths. We show via simulations that, despite their extreme simplicity, such codes still show the threshold saturation behavior known from the spatially coupled codes discussed in the literature. Further, we show h…
This paper propose a decoder architecture for low-density parity-check convolutional code (LDPCCC). Specifically, the LDPCCC is derived from a quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC block code. By making use of the quasi-cyclic structure, the proposed LDPCCC decoder adopts a dynamic message storage in the memory and uses a simple address controller. The decoder efficiently combines the memories in the pipelining processors into a large memory block so as to take advantage of the data-width of the embedded memory in a modern field-programmable gate array (FPGA). A rate-5/6 QC-LDPCCC has been implemented on an …
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…
With the use of belief propagation (BP) decoding algorithm, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can achieve near-Shannon limit performance. In order to evaluate the error performance of LDPC codes, simulators running on CPUs are commonly used. However, the time taken to evaluate LDPC codes with very good error performance is excessive. In this paper, efficient LDPC block-code decoders/simulators which run on graphics processing units (GPUs) are proposed. We also implement the decoder for the LDPC convolutional code (LDPCCC). The LDPCCC is derived from a pre-designed quasi-cyclic LDPC block c…
We study the scaling behavior of coupled sparse graph codes over the binary erasure channel. In particular, let 2L+1 be the length of the coupled chain, let M be the number of variables in each of the 2L + 1 local copies, let l be the number of iterations, let Pb denote the bit error probability, and let ε denote the channel parameter. We are interested in how these quantities scale when we let the blocklength (2L + 1)M tend to infinity. Based on empirical evidence we show that the threshold saturation phenomenon is rather stable with respect to the scaling of the various parameters and we for…
We consider automorphism ensemble decoding (AED) of quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Belief propagation (BP) decoding on the conventional factor graph is equivariant to the quasi-cyclic automorphisms and therefore prevents gains by AED. However, by applying small modifications to the parity-check matrix at the receiver side, we can break the symmetry without changing the code at the transmitter. This way, we can leverage a gain in error-correcting performance using an ensemble of identical BP decoders, without increasing the worst-case decoding latency. The proposed met…
Convolutional LDPC ensembles, introduced by Felstrom and Zigangirov, have excellent thresholds and these thresholds are rapidly increasing as a function of the average degree. Several variations on the basic theme have been proposed to date, all of which share the good performance characteristics of convolutional LDPC ensembles. We describe the fundamental mechanism which explains why "convolutional-like" or "spatially coupled" codes perform so well. In essence, the spatial coupling of the individual code structure has the effect of increasing the belief-propagation (BP) threshold of the new e…
We consider the decoding of convolutional codes using an error trellis constructed based on a submatrix of a given check matrix. In the proposed method, the syndrome-subsequence computed using the remaining submatrix is utilized as auxiliary information for decoding. Then the ML error path is correctly decoded using the degenerate error trellis. We also show that the decoding complexity of the proposed method is basically identical with that of the conventional one based on the original error trellis. Next, we apply the method to check matrices with monomial entries proposed by Tanner et al. B…
In this paper, we introduce two new methods of mitigating decoder error propagation for low-latency sliding window decoding (SWD) of spatially coupled low density parity check (SC-LDPC) codes. Building on the recently introduced idea of \emph{check node (CN) doping} of regular SC-LDPC codes, here we employ variable node (VN) doping to fix (set to a known value) a subset of variable nodes in the coupling chain. Both of these doping methods have the effect of allowing SWD to recover from error propagation, at a cost of a slight rate loss. Experimental results show that, similar to CN doping, VN …
CC-GLPDC codes are a class of generalized low-density parity-check (GLDPC) codes where the constraint nodes (CNs) represent convolutional codes. This allows for efficient decoding in the trellis with the forward-backward algorithm, and the strength of the component codes easily can be controlled by the encoder memory without changing the graph structure. In this letter, we extend the class of CC-GLDPC codes by introducing different types of irregularity at the CNs and investigating their effect on the BP and MAP decoding thresholds for the binary erasure channel (BEC). For the considered class…
This paper provides a construction of non-binary LDPC convolutional codes, which generalizes the work of Robinson and Bernstein. The sets of integers forming an $(n-1,w)$-difference triangle set are used as supports of the columns of rate $(n-1)/n$ convolutional codes. If the field size is large enough, the Tanner graph associated to the sliding parity-check matrix of the code is free from $4$ and $6$-cycles not satisfying the full rank condition. This is important for improving the performance of a code and avoiding the presence of low-weight codewords and absorbing sets. The parameters of th…
In this paper, we propose an enhanced quasi-maximum likelihood (EQML) decoder for LDPC codes with short block lengths. After the failure of the conventional belief propagation (BP) decoding, the proposed EQML decoder selects unreliable variable nodes (VNs) and saturates their associated channel output values to generate a list of decoder input sequences. Each decoder input sequence in the list is then decoded by the conventional BP decoder to obtain the most likely codeword. To improve the accuracy of selecting unreliable VNs, we propose an edge-wise selection method based on the sign fluctuat…
In this paper a new message passing algorithm, which takes advantage of both tree-based re-parameterization and the knowledge of short cycles, is introduced for the purpose of decoding LDPC codes with short block lengths. The proposed algorithm is called variable factor appearance probability belief propagation (VFAP-BP) algorithm and is suitable for wireless communications applications, where both good decoding performance and low-latency are expected. Our simulation results show that the VFAP-BP algorithm outperforms the standard BP algorithm and requires a significantly smaller number of it…
Families of generalized spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (GSC-LDPC) code ensembles can be formed by terminating protograph-based generalized LDPC convolutional (GLDPCC) codes. It has previously been shown that ensembles of GSC-LDPC codes constructed from a protograph have better iterative decoding thresholds than their block code counterparts, and that, for large termination lengths, their thresholds coincide with the maximum a-posteriori (MAP) decoding threshold of the underlying generalized LDPC block code ensemble. Here we show that, in addition to their excellent iterative decodi…
Belief propagation (BP) decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with various dynamic decoding schedules have been proposed to improve the efficiency of the conventional flooding schedule. As the ultimate goal of an ideal LDPC code decoder is to have correct bit decisions, a dynamic decoding schedule should be variable node (VN)-centric and be able to find the VNs with probable incorrect decisions and having a good chance to be corrected if chosen for update. We propose a novel and effective metric called conditional innovation (CI) which serves this design goal well. To make the most…
In this paper, we propose a novel low complexity scaling strategy of min-sum decoding algorithm for irregular LDPC codes. In the proposed method, we generalize our previously proposed simplified Variable Scaled Min-Sum (SVS-min-sum) by replacing the sub-optimal starting value and heuristic update for the scaling factor sequence by optimized values. Density evolution and Nelder-Mead optimization are used offline, prior to the decoding, to obtain the optimal starting point and per iteration updating step size for the scaling factor sequence of the proposed scaling strategy. The optimization of t…
In this paper, a construction of $(n,k,δ)$ LDPC convolutional codes over arbitrary finite fields, which generalizes the work of Robinson and Bernstein and the later work of Tong is provided. The sets of integers forming a $(k,w)$-(weak) difference triangle set are used as supports of some columns of the sliding parity-check matrix of an $(n,k,δ)$ convolutional code, where $n\in\mathbb{N}$, $n>k$. The parameters of the convolutional code are related to the parameters of the underlying difference triangle set. In particular, a relation between the free distance of the code and $w$ is established…
This paper presents a theoretical study of a new type of LDPC codes motivated by practical storage applications. LDPCL codes (suffix L represents locality) are LDPC codes that can be decoded either as usual over the full code block, or locally when a smaller sub-block is accessed (to reduce latency). LDPCL codes are designed to maximize the error-correction performance vs. rate in the usual (global) mode, while at the same time providing a certain performance in the local mode. We develop a theoretical framework for the design of LDPCL codes. Our results include a design tool to construct an L…
The relation between parity-check matrices of quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and biadjacency matrices of bipartite graphs supports searching for powerful LDPC block codes. Using the principle of tailbiting, compact representations of bipartite graphs based on convolutional codes can be found. Bounds on the girth and the minimum distance of LDPC block codes constructed in such a way are discussed. Algorithms for searching iteratively for LDPC block codes with large girth and for determining their minimum distance are presented. Constructions based on all-ones matrices, …
In a digital communication system, information is sent from one place to another over a noisy communication channel. It may be possible to detect and correct errors that occur during the transmission if one encodes the original information by adding redundant bits. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes, a member of the LDPC code family, encode the original information to improve error correction capability. In practice these codes are used to decode very long information sequences, where the information arrives in subsequent packets over time, such as video streams. We consider t…
Quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are an important instance of proto-graph-based LDPC codes. In this paper we present upper bounds on the minimum Hamming distance of QC LDPC codes and study how these upper bounds depend on graph structure parameters (like variable degrees, check node degrees, girth) of the Tanner graph and of the underlying proto-graph. Moreover, for several classes of proto-graphs we present explicit QC LDPC code constructions that achieve (or come close to) the respective minimum Hamming distance upper bounds. Because of the tight algebraic connection b…
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…
Owing to their capacity-achieving performance and low encoding and decoding complexity, polar codes have drawn much research interests recently. Successive cancellation decoding (SCD) and belief propagation decoding (BPD) are two common approaches for decoding polar codes. SCD is sequential in nature while BPD can run in parallel. Thus BPD is more attractive for low latency applications. However BPD has some performance degradation at higher SNR when compared with SCD. Concatenating LDPC with Polar codes is one popular approach to enhance the performance of BPD , where a short LDPC code is use…
Dirty paper coding (DPC) refers to methods for pre-subtraction of known interference at the transmitter of a multiuser communication system. There are numerous applications for DPC, including coding for broadcast channels. Recently, lattice-based coding techniques have provided several designs for DPC. In lattice-based DPC, there are two codes - a convolutional code that defines a lattice used for shaping and an error correction code used for channel coding. Several specific designs have been reported in the recent literature using convolutional and graph-based codes for capacity-approaching s…
The power consumption of the integrated circuit is becoming a significant burden, particularly for large-scale signal processing tasks requiring high throughput. The decoding process of LDPC codes is such a heavy signal processing task that demands power efficiency and higher decoding throughput. A promising approach to reducing both power and latency of a decoding process is to use an analog circuit instead of a digital circuit. This paper investigates a continuous-time gradient flow-based approach for decoding LDPC codes, which employs a potential energy function similar to the objective fun…
Families of "asymptotically regular" LDPC block code ensembles can be formed by terminating (J,K)-regular protograph-based LDPC convolutional codes. By varying the termination length, we obtain a large selection of LDPC block code ensembles with varying code rates, minimum distance that grows linearly with block length, and capacity approaching iterative decoding thresholds, despite the fact that the terminated ensembles are almost regular. In this paper, we investigate the properties of the quasi-cyclic (QC) members of such an ensemble. We show that an upper bound on the minimum Hamming dista…
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…
We consider spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes within a non-orthogonal interleave division multiple access (IDMA) scheme to avoid cumbersome degree profile matching of the LDPC code components to the iterative multi-user detector (MUD). Besides excellent decoding thresholds, the approach benefits from the possibility of using rather simple and regular underlying block LDPC codes owing to the universal behavior of the resulting coupled code with respect to the channel front-end, i.e., the iterative MUD. Furthermore, an additional outer repetition code makes the scheme fl…
In this paper we investigate the effect of spatial coupling applied to the recently-proposed coded slotted ALOHA (CSA) random access protocol. Thanks to the bridge between the graphical model describing the iterative interference cancelation process of CSA over the random access frame and the erasure recovery process of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the binary erasure channel (BEC), we propose an access protocol which is inspired by the convolutional LDPC code construction. The proposed protocol exploits the terminations of its graphical model to achieve the spatial coupling effec…
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…
