Analysis of threshold of regular and irregular LDPC codes using Gaussian approximation

We present the formulas for searching for the thresholds of regular and irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes under message-passing (MP) algorithm. A Gaussian approximation is applied to studying the evolution of the means of the messages of the variable nodes and the check nodes. Accurate numerical integration methods by using transformations are shown for evaluating the expected values of the message of the check nodes. Tables are built first and interpolations are used for further evaluations. Two curves are used to locate the threshold. We utilize an iterative decoding tunnel between these two curves and study the decoding performance by evaluating conditions of the derivatives of these two curves. Using this method the performance of both regular and irregular LDPC codes can be studied in a unified manner without using simulation.