On the Hardness of Approximating Stopping and Trapping Sets
Andrew McGregor, Olgica Milenković · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory · 2010
We prove that approximating the size of stopping and trapping sets in Tanner graphs of linear block codes, and more restrictively, the class of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, is NP-hard. The ramifications of our findings are that methods used for estimating the height of the error-floor of moderate- and long-length LDPC codes, based on stopping and trapping set enumeration, cannot provide accurate worst-case performance predictions for most codes.