Near optimum universal belief propagation based decoding of low-density parity check codes

In this paper, we propose a belief-propagation (BP)-based decoding algorithm which utilizes normalization to improve the accuracy of the soft values delivered by a previously proposed simplified BP-based algorithm. The normalization factors can be obtained not only by simulation, but also, importantly, theoretically. This new BP-based algorithm is much simpler to implement than BP decoding as it requires only additions of the normalized received values and is universal, i.e., the decoding is independent of the channel characteristics. Some simulation results are given, which show this new decoding approach can achieve an error performance very close to that of BP on the additive white Gaussian noise channel,…