Hybrid decoding of finite geometry low-density parity-check codes

For finite geometry low-density parity-check codes, heavy row and column weights in their parity check matrix make the decoding with even min-Sum (MS) variants computationally expensive. To alleviate it, the authors present a class of hybrid schemes by concatenating a parallel bit flipping (BF) variant with an MS variant. Meanwhile, the BF variant, with much less computational complexity, attempts decoding the receive sequence firstly, and only decoding failure of the BF variant triggers the MS variant. Hence the BF variant performance heavily impacts the overall hybrid scheme, which is illustrated in two case studies. Computational and hardware complexity is then elaborated to justify the feasibility of the hybrid schemes. In most SNR region of interest, without compromising performance or convergence rate, the proposed hybrid schemes can save substantial computational complexity when compared with the MS variant decoding alone.