Refined Reliability Combining for Binary Message Passing Decoding of Product Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces iBDD-CR, a soft-aided iterative decoding algorithm for product codes that improves error correction performance by utilizing reliability information, achieving up to 0.51 dB gain over traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel decoding algorithm, iBDD-CR, which enhances conventional iBDD by incorporating soft reliability information for product codes.

Findings

iBDD-CR achieves up to 0.51 dB performance gain over iBDD.

Density evolution analysis confirms the effectiveness of iBDD-CR for GLDPC ensembles.

Applicable to high-throughput systems like fiber-optic communications.

Abstract

We propose a novel soft-aided iterative decoding algorithm for product codes (PCs). The proposed algorithm, named iterative bounded distance decoding with combined reliability (iBDD-CR), enhances the conventional iterative bounded distance decoding (iBDD) of PCs by exploiting some level of soft information. In particular, iBDD-CR can be seen as a modification of iBDD where the hard decisions of the row and column decoders are made based on a reliability estimate of the BDD outputs. The reliability estimates are derived using extrinsic message passing for generalized low-density-parity check (GLDPC) ensembles, which encompass PCs. We perform a density evolution analysis of iBDD-CR for transmission over the additive white Gaussian noise channel for the GLDPC ensemble. We consider both binary transmission and bit-interleaved coded modulation with quadrature amplitude modulation.We show that iBDD-CR achieves performance gains up to $0.51$ dB compared to iBDD with the same internal decoder data flow. This makes the algorithm an attractive solution for very high-throughput applications such as fiber-optic communications.