On stopping criteria for Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

A stopping criterion for short-length low-density parity-check codes (LDPC) is developed based on accumulating evidence which indicates whether the decoder should be allowed to iterate beyond a predefined iteration limit that is lower than the normal maximum number of decoder iterations. Without any additional decoding complexity, we find that the average number of iterations at low SNRs can be reduced without sacrificing performance. Simulation results are presented for the rate frac12 (288, 576) and the rate frac12 (1152, 2304) WiMAX 802.16e LDPC code over an AWGN channel with binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation.