Outage-Limit-Approaching Protograph LDPC Codes for Slow-Fading Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the design of root-protograph LDPC codes that approach the outage limit in slow-fading wireless channels, emphasizing their low complexity and high performance.

Contribution

It summarizes the design principles of RP LDPC codes, highlighting their potential to achieve near-outage-limit performance with low complexity in BF channels.

Findings

RP LDPC codes achieve near-outage-limit performance.

They enable linear-complexity encoding and high-speed decoding.

Design guidelines can inspire further research.

Abstract

Block-fading (BF) channel, also known as slow-fading channel, is a type of simple and practical channel model that can characterize the primary feature of a number of wireless-communication applications with low to moderate mobility. Although the BF channel has received significant research attention in the past twenty years, designing low-complexity outage-limit-approaching error-correction codes (ECCs) is still a challenging issue. For this reason, a novel family of protograph low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, called root-protograph (RP) LDPC codes, has been conceived recently. The RP codes can not only realize linear-complexity encoding and high-speed decoding with the help of a quasi-cyclic (QC) structure, but also achieve near-outage-limit performance in a variety of BF scenarios. In this article, we briefly review the design guidelines of such protograph codes with the aim of inspiring further research activities in this area.