Trellis-Based Extended Min-Sum Algorithm for Non-Binary LDPC Codes and its Hardware Structure

In this paper, we present an improvement and a new implementation of a simplified decoding algorithm for non-binary low density parity-check codes (NB-LDPC) in Galois fields GF(q). The base algorithm that we use is the Extended Min-Sum (EMS) algorithm, which has been widely studied in the recent literature, and has been shown to approach the performance of the belief propagation (BP) algorithm, with limited complexity. In our work, we propose a new way to compute modified configuration sets, using a trellis representation of incoming messages to check nodes. We call our modification of the EMS algorithm trellis-EMS (T-EMS). In the T-EMS, the algorithm operates directly on the deviation space by considering a trellis built from differential messages, which serves as a new reliability measure to sort the configurations. We show that this new trellis representation reduces the computational complexity, without any performance degradation. In addition, we show that our modifications of the algorithm allows to greatly reduce the decoding latency, by using a larger degree of hardware parallelization.