Symbol-flipping based decoding of generalized low-density parity-check codes over GF(q)

An efficient symbol-flipping based decoding algorithm designed for nonbinary generalized low-density parity-check (GLDPC) codes is proposed. By extending the concept of the weighted bit flip voting (WBFV) algorithm designed for binary Hamming-code based GLDPC codes, the symbol-flipping decoding algorithm can be beneficially employed for decoding the family of GLDPC codes constructed from nonbinary constituent codes, such as nonbinary Bose Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH) codes or Reed Solomon (R-S) codes. The simulation results demonstrate that improvements of 1 dB and 2.7 dB are achieved by the proposed coding scheme in comparison to the more conventional binary GLDPC codes using the WBFV decoding algorithm, when using the Galois Field GF(32) for communicating over AWGN and uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels, respectively