Analysis of belief-propagation decoding of LDPC codes over the biAWGN channel using improved Gaussian approximation based on the mutual information measure

Summary form only given. The capacity of the message-passing decoder for LDPC codes can be computed by the density evolution algorithm by iteratively computing message densities. The infinite-dimensional problem of iteratively calculating the message densities in the case of the binary input AWGN channel and the belief propagation decoder can be simplified to a one-dimensional problem by using a Gaussian approximation. By assuming Gaussian densities the density evolution simplifies to updating means of Gaussian densities. An improved Gaussian approximation algorithm is suggested for computing the capacity of the BP decoder based on the mutual information measure. An analytical method for computing the mutual information of a transmitted bit with the message corresponding to it is proposed. Using this method we can approximate the non-Gaussian message by a Gaussian message that has the same mutual information with the transmitted bit. Computationally, the algorithm is similar to the Gaussian approximation algorithm proposed in Chung (2001). For various regular LDPC codes that were examined, the algorithm computed threshold values within 0.01dB or less from the exact threshold which is an improvement over the Gaussian approximation. Furthermore, additional insight on the convergence process can be gained from EXIT charts that can be derived from the algorithm. This can assist in designing better irregular LDPC codes.