LDPC coding with soft information relaying in cooperative wireless networks

This paper investigates soft information relaying (SIR) for low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded transmission in wireless networks. We introduce a new scheme for soft parity symbol generation at the relay, which features two key strategies: a two-step soft parity generation process, and a prescaling technique. The two-step soft parity generation procedure is designed to allow efficient relay processing, while yielding an overall (i.e., destination) parity-check matrix structure with desirable properties. The pre-scaling method prevents the amplitudes of generated soft symbols successively converging to zero, as happens with some existing soft forwarding methods. Finally, we propose an appropriate LLR former at the destination which is tailored to the proposed soft parity generation technique. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed relay protocol yields an improved BER performance compared to competitive schemes proposed in the literature.