Mutual Information-Maximizing Quantized Layered Min-Sum Decoding of QC-LDPC Codes
Cheng Lv, Xuan He, Peng Kang, Kui Cai, Jiongyue Xing, Xiaohu Tang · GLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference · 2022
In this paper, we propose a mutual information-maximizing quantized layered min-sum (MIM-QLMS) decoder for quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes. Our proposed decoder operates similarly to a layered min-sum decoder with additional reconstruction and quantization operations by using single-input lookup tables (LUTs). In particular, we first develop the protograph-based MIM density evolution to design the LUTs, which may differ for each iteration and each edge in the protograph of the QC-LDPC codes. Furthermore, to minimize the memory requirement for storing the LUTs, we propose an optimization method to unify all LUTs into only four distinct LUTs, which can be used for all decoding iterations. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed MIM-QLMS decoders are the first class of layered finite alphabet iterative decoders (FAIDs) that are designed based on accurately tracking the probability distributions of the exchanged messages. Simulation results show that for 3-bit (resp. 4-bit) exchanged message precision, the proposed MIM-QLMS decoders can reasonably (resp. generally) outperform the state-of-the-art layered FAIDs and the layered normalized min-sum decoder, in terms of both the error rate performance and the average number of iterations.