Improved bit-flipping decoding of low-density parity-check codes

In this correspondence, a new method for improving hard-decision bit-flipping decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is presented. Bits with a number of unsatisfied check sums larger than a predetermined threshold are flipped with a probability p ≤ 1 which is independent of the code considered. The probability p is incremented during decoding according to some rule. With a proper choice of the initial p, the proposed improved bit-flipping (BF) algorithm achieves gain not only in performance, but also in average decoding time for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values of interest with respect to p = 1.