Hardware Complexity Reduction of LDPC-CC Decoders Based on Message-Passing Approaches

LDPC convolutional codes (LDPC-CC) are a family of error-correcting codes (ECC) used in digital communication systems like the IEEE 1901 standard. High throughput and low complexity hardware architectures were designed for real time systems. In this article we demonstrate that an efficient selection of the message passing (MP) algorithm for LDPC-CC decoding improves the architecture features of related works. In fact, considering the LDPC-CC decoders proposed for the IEEE 1901 standard, we show that an appropriate Min-Sum approximation selection can significantly improve the error correction performance by 0.1 to 0.2 dB in terms of Bit Error Ratio. It can also reduce the hardware complexity by 10% to 20% with no impact on the Bit Error Ratio performance.