Girth aware normalized min sum decoding algorithm for shorter length low density parity check codes

Abstract

Recently, short block codes are in great demand due to the emergent applications requiring the transmission of a short data unit and can guarantee speedy communication, with a minimum of latency and complexity which are among the technical challenges in today’s wireless services and systems. In the context of channel coding using low density parity check (LDPC) codes, the shorter length LDPC block codes are more likely to have short cycles with lengths of 4 and 6. The effect of the cycle with the minimum size is that this one prevents the propagation of the information in the Tanner graph during the iterative process. Therefore, the message decoded by short block code is assumed to be of poor quality due to short cycles. In this work, we present a study of the evolution of the messages on check nodes during the iterative decoding process when using the LDPC decoding algorithm normalized min sum (NMS), to see the destructive effect of short cycles and justify the effectiveness of the girth aware normalized min sum (GA-NMS) decoding LDPC codes algorithm in terms of correction of the errors, particularly for the codes with short cycles 4 and 6. In addition to this, the GA-NMS algorithm is evaluated in terms of bit error rate performance and convergence behavior, using wireless regional area networks (WRAN) LDPC code, which is considered as a short block code.