Evaluation of the Low Error-Rate Performance of LDPC Codes over Rayleigh Fading Channels Using Importance Sampling

In this paper we propose a novel importance sampling (IS) scheme to estimate the low error-rate performance of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over Rayleigh fading channels. The proposed scheme exploits the structural weakness of LDPC codes due to trapping sets (TSs). The Rayleigh fading distribution on the bits belonging to a TS is biased by parameter scaling (PS), while the noise distribution on them is biased via mean translation (MT) according to their fading coefficients. The biases in PS and MT are determined so that the variance of the proposed IS estimator is minimized. The proposed IS scheme is compared with the Monte Carlo (MC) simulator and other IS schemes modified from the conventional IS scheme employed for performance estimation of LDPC codes over an AWGN channel. Numerical results show that it provides much more accurate performance than other IS schemes. Furthermore, the proposed IS estimator is even more efficient than the MC estimator and other IS estimators from the viewpoint of the number of required simulation runs.