LDPC-Staircase Codes for Soft Decision Decoding
V. B. Wijekoon, Emanuele Viterbo, Yi Hong · 2020
Staircase codes, a class of product-like codes, have been demonstrated to perform exceptionally well in optical transmission systems. Although they are predominantly used with BCH component codes and hard decision decoding, soft decision decoding has also been recently attempted, with BCH and polar code based staircase codes. We consider using LDPC codes as the component code of soft decoded staircase codes. Results demonstrate that these codes offer very good performance, with gains in the range of 0.5-1dB over soft decoded BCH-staircase codes, at a BER of 1$0^{-8}$. These can be further improved through the novel bit-flipping scheme we propose.