Designing Very Good Low-Density Parity-Check Codes for the Gilbert-Elliott Channel
Andrew W. Eckford, Frank R. Kschischang, Subbarayan Pasupathy · 2003
It has been shown using density evolution (DE) that joint estimation-decoding strategies have excellent performance for regular lowdensity parity-check (LDPC) codes in the GilbertElliott (GE) channel. However, DE is computationally intensive, and is therefore not suitable as a tool in searching for good degree sequences for irregular LDPC codes. In this paper, we present a reduced-complexity approximate DE scheme that is particularly suitable for the GE channel, based on the expected value approximation from [7]. The proposed technique takes advantage of a specially constructed decoder for which the ultimate performance is the same as the standard decoder, but for which DE is easier to approximate. We show that this straightforward approximation allows the channel messages to be precalculated, resulting in computational complexity comparable to the memoryless case.