ISIT 2000, Sorrento, Italy, June 25-30,2000

Design of Provably Good Low-Density Parity Check Codes

Thomas Richardson
Lucent Technolo&es, Murray Hill, NJ tjr0lucent.com

Amin Shokrollahi
Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ aminQresearch.bel1-labs.com

Riidiger Urbanke
Communications Theory Lab, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland Rudiger.UrbankeQepfl.ch

Abstract - We design sequences of low-density parity check codes that provably perform at rates extremely close to the Shannon capacity. These codes are built from highly irregular bipartite graphs with carefully chosen degree patterns on both sides. We further show that under suitable conditions the message densities fulflll a certain symmetry condition which we call the consbtency condition and we present a stability condition which is the most powerful tool to date to bound/determine the threshold of a given family of low-density parity check codes.

In the following, we call a distribution f on R consistent if it satisfies f(z) = f(-.)e for all z E R+. For example, a Gaussian density is consistent iff its mean p and variance a are related by 6 = 2 p . The following theorem can often be used to achieve significant speed-ups and improved accuracy in the determination of these message distributions.

Theorem 1 Suppose that a binary-input channel has symmetrypropertyp(y I z = 1) = p(-y I z = -1). Under the all-one codeword assumption let Pt denote the message distribution
of a belief-propagation decoder at the e-th iteration, where all messages are assumed to be in log-likelihood ratio form. Then P t is consistent.

I . INTRODUCTION
In this paper we present irregular low-density panty check (LDPC) [1,4] codes which exhibit performance extremely close to the best possible as determined by the Shannon capacity formula. These codes are characterized by their degree sequence pair ( X ( z ) , p ( z ) ) 123 and a random choice of the connections. For the additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGNC) the best code of rate one-half presented in this paper has a threshold within 0.06dB from capacity, and simulation results show that our best LDPC code of length lo6 achieves a bit error probability of lo- less than 0.13dB away from capacity, beating even the best (turbo) codes known so far. 104
104

Assume that after some iterations the number of remaining errors is fairly small. Will the number of errors converge to zero if we proceed with further iteration rounds or will it stay bounded away from zero regardless of the number of iterations? This is answered in

Theorem 2 Let g(s) be the moment generating function corresponding to the initial message distribution Po(z), i.e., g(s) = Epo[eax], and assume that g(s) < 00 for all s in some neighborhood of zero. Define r = -log (inf,<o g(s)) which for consistent initial message distributions PO simplifies to r = -log (2sOwPo(.) e-/ d z ) . I f X(O)p(l) > er, then the probability of error of density evolution is strictly bounded away from 0. Conversely, if X(O)p(l) < er, then there ezists c > 0 such that if density evolution is initialized with a consistent message distribution P satisfying PrJ,P) < c, then the probability of error will converge to zero under density evolution.

104

104

For the binary erasure channel, the binary symmetric channel and the additive white Gaussian noise channel we have er =
e = 1 and er = e h , respectively.
2&i=7
0.0
11)

i,

104

0.2
W 7 7

a4
0.966

0.8
OorJ

0.8
W12

1.0
Ddol

12
0471 01%

E & [ a
06610

111. OPTIMIZATION
By optimizing the degree sequence pair (X(z), p ( z ) ) we have found ensembles of irregular LDPC codes with thresholds extremely close to capacity for a wide range of rates and channels [31.

0.1~0

ais

o w

ai&

aim

ow

aiz

P .

Figure 1: Comparison of (3,6)-regular LDPC code, turbo code,

and optimized irregular LDPC code. All codes are of length log and of rate one-half. The bit error rate for the AWGNC is shown as a function of &/No (in dB), the standard deviation U , as well BB the raw input bit error probability Pb.

REFERENCES
R. Gallager, Low-Density Parity-Check Codes, Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1963. T. Richardson and R. Urbanke, The Capacity of Low-Density Parity-CheckCodes under Message Passing Decoding, submitT , 1999. ted IEEE I T. Richardson, A. Shokrollahi and R. Urbanke, Design of Provably Good Low-Density Parity-Check Codes, submitted IEEE IT, 1999. M. Luby, M. Mitzenmacher, A. Shokrollahi, and D. Spielman, Analysis of Low-Density Codes and Improved Designs Using Irregular Graphs, in Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 1998, pp. 249-258.

11. ANALYTIC PROPERTIES OF DENSITY EVOLUTION

Assume we employ a message passing decoder on an infinitely long LDPC code. Let Pt denote thedistribution of messages emitted from the variable nodes at the e-th iteration assuming that the all-one codeword was transmitted. The sequence of distributions Pt and their determination is collectively referred to as density evolution [2].

0-7803-5857-0/00/%10.00 0 2 0 0 0 IEEE.

199

Authorized licensed use limited to: SHIBAURA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. Downloaded on April 13,2010 at 09:56:48 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.