A Comparative Study of Ensemble Decoding Methods for Short Length LDPC Codes

Understand

To alleviate the suboptimal performance of belief propagation (BP) decoding of short low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, a plethora of improved decoding algorithms has been proposed over the last two decades.

• Many of these methods can be described using the same general framework, which we call ensemble decoding: A set of independent constituent decoders works in parallel on the received sequence, each proposing a codeword candidate.
• From this list, the maximum likelihood (ML) decision is designated as the decoder output.
• In this paper, we qualitatively and quantitatively compare different realizations of the ensemble decoder, namely multiple-bases belief propagation (MBBP), automorphism ensemble decoding (AED), scheduling ensemble decoding (SED), noise-aided ensemble decoding (NED) and saturated belief propagation (SBP).