Modified sum-product algorithms for decoding low-density parity-check codes

The authors deal with the sum-product algorithm (SPA) based on the hyperbolic tangent (tanh) rule when it is applied for decoding low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Motivated by the finding that, because of the large number of multiplications required by the algorithm, an overflow in the decoder may occur, two novel modifications of the tanh function (and its inverse) are proposed. By means of computer simulations, both methods are evaluated using random-based LDPC codes with binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signals transmitted over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. It is shown that the proposed modifications improve the bit error rate (BER) performance up to 1 dB with respect to the conventional SPA. These results have also shown that the error floor is removed at BER lower than 10^-6. Furthermore, two novel approximations are presented to reduce the computational complexity of the tanh function (and its inverse), based on either a piecewise linear function or a quantisation table. It is shown that the proposed approximations can slightly improve the BER performance (up to 0.13 dB) in the former case, whereas small BER performance degradation is observed (<0.25 dB) in the latter case. In both cases, however, the decoding complexity is reduced significantly