This paper presents new FEC codes for the erasure channel, LDPC-Band, that have been designed so as to optimize a hybrid iterative-Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding. Indeed, these codes feature simultaneously a sparse parity check matrix, which allows an efficient use of iterative LDPC decoding, and a generator matrix with a band structure, which allows fast ML decoding on the erasure channel. The combination of these two decoding algorithms leads to erasure codes achieving a very good trade-off between complexity and erasure correction capability.
Recently, two independent works @cite_12 @cite_13 proposed a hybrid iterative-ML decoding algorithm, where ML decoding is only used when the iterative decoding does not succeed to decode a received codeword.
@cite_13 @cite_12
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We introduce a simple technique for analyzing the iterative decoder that is broadly applicable to different classes of codes defined over graphs in certain fading as well as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. The technique is based on the observation that the extrinsic information from constituent maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoders is well approximated by Gaussian random variables when the inputs to the decoders are Gaussian. The independent Gaussian model implies the existence of an iterative decoder threshold that statistically characterizes the convergence of the iterative decoder. Specifically, the iterative decoder converges to zero probability of error as the number of iterations increases if and only if the channel E sub b N sub 0 exceeds the threshold. Despite the idealization of the model and the simplicity of the analysis technique, the predicted threshold values are in excellent agreement with the waterfall regions observed experimentally in the literature when the codeword lengths are large. Examples are given for parallel concatenated convolutional codes, serially concatenated convolutional codes, and the generalized low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes of Gallager and Cheng-McEliece (1996). Convergence-based design of asymmetric parallel concatenated convolutional codes (PCCC) is also discussed. An iterative decoding threshold analysis for terminated regular LDPC convolutional (LDPCC) codes is presented. Using density evolution techniques, the convergence behavior of an iterative belief propagation decoder is analyzed for the binary erasure channel and the AWGN channel with binary inputs. It is shown that for a terminated LDPCC code ensemble, the thresholds are better than for corresponding regular and irregular LDPC block codes. The problem of low complexity linear programming (LP) decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is considered. An iterative algorithm, similar to min-sum and belief propagation, for efficient approximate solution of this problem was proposed by Vontobel and Koetter. In this paper, the convergence rate and computational complexity of this algorithm are studied using a scheduling scheme that we propose. In particular, we are interested in obtaining a feasible vector in the LP decoding problem that is close to optimal in the following sense. The distance, normalized by the block length, between the minimum and the objective function value of this approximate solution can be made arbitrarily small. It is shown that such a feasible vector can be obtained with a computational complexity which scales linearly with the block length. Combined with previous results that have shown that the LP decoder can correct some fixed fraction of errors we conclude that this error correction can be achieved with linear computational complexity. This is achieved by first applying the iterative LP decoder that decodes the correct transmitted codeword up to an arbitrarily small fraction of erroneous bits, and then correcting the remaining errors using some standard method. These conclusions are also extended to generalized LDPC codes. Two-dimensional (2-D) correction schemes are proposed to improve the performance of conventional min-sum (MS) decoding of irregular low density parity check codes. An iterative procedure based on parallel differential optimization is presented to obtain the optimal 2-D factors. Both density evolution analysis and simulation show that the proposed method provides a comparable performance as belief propagation (BP) decoding while requiring less complexity. Interestingly, the new method exhibits a lower error floor than that of BP decoding. With respect to conventional MS and 1-D normalized MS decodings, the 2-D normalized MS offers a better performance. The 2-D offset MS decoding exhibits a similar behavior.