A New Linear Programming Approach to Decoding Linear Block Codes

In this paper, we propose a new linear programming formulation for the decoding of general linear block codes. Different from the original formulation given by Feldman, the number of total variables to characterize a parity-check constraint in our formulation is less than twice the degree of the corresponding check node. The equivalence between our new formulation and the original formulation is proven. The new formulation facilitates to characterize the structure of linear block codes, and leads to new decoding algorithms. In particular, we show that any fundamental polytope is simply the intersection of a group of the so-called minimum polytopes, and this simplified formulation allows us to formulate the problem of calculating the minimum Hamming distance of any linear block code as a simple linear integer programming problem with much less auxiliary variables. We then propose a branch-and-bound method to compute a lower bound to the minimum distance of any linear code by solving a corresponding linear integer programming problem. In addition, we prove that, for the family of single parity-check (SPC) product codes, the fractional distance and the pseudodistance are both equal to the minimum distance. Finally, we propose an efficient algorithm for decoding SPC product codes with low complexity and maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding performance.