Finite Alphabet Iterative Decoders - Part II: Towards Guaranteed Error Correction of LDPC Codes via Iterative Decoder Diversity

Recently, we introduced a new class of finite alphabet iterative decoders (FAIDs) for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These decoders are capable of surpassing belief propagation in the error floor region on the Binary Symmetric channel with much lower complexity. In this paper, we introduce a a novel scheme to further increase the guaranteed error correction capability from what is achievable by a FAID on column-weight-three LDPC codes. The proposed scheme uses a plurality of FAIDs which collectively correct more error patterns than a single FAID on a given code. The collection of FAIDs utilized by the scheme is judiciously chosen to ensure that individual decoders have different decoding dynamics and correct different error patterns. Consequently, they can collectively correct a diverse set This work was funded by the NSF under grant CCF-0963726 and the Institut Universitaire de France grant. Part of the material in this paper was presented at the Information theory and Applications workshop (ITA’2012). D. Declercq and E. Li are with ENSEA/University of Cergy-Pontoise/CNRS UMR 8051, 95014 Cergy-Pontoise, France (email: {declercq,erbao.li}@ensea.fr) B. Vasić is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85719 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). S. K. Planjery is with both the above institutions (email: [email protected]). July 23, 2012 DRAFT ar X iv :1 20 7. 48 07 v1 [ cs .I T ] 1 9 Ju l 2 01 2