Hybrid weighted bit flipping low density parity check decoding

Low density parity check codes (LDPC) exhibit near capacity performance in terms of error correction. Large hardware costs, limited flexibility in terms of code length/code rate and considerable power consumption limit the use of belief-propagation algorithm based LDPC decoders in area and energy sensitive mobile environment. Serial bit flipping algorithms offer a trade-off between resource utilization and error correction performance at the expense of increased number of decoding iterations required for convergence. Parallel weighted bit flipping decoding and its variants aim at reducing the decoding iteration and time by flipping the potential erroneous bits in parallel. However, in most of the existing parallel decoding methods, the flipping threshold requires complex computations. In this paper, Hybrid Weighted Bit Flipping (HWBF) decoding is proposed to allow multiple bit flipping in each decoding iteration. To compute the number of bits that can be flipped in parallel, a criterion for determining the relationship between the erroneous bits in received code word is proposed. Using the proposed relation the proposed scheme can detect and correct a maximum of 3 erreneous hard decision bits in an iteration. The simulation results show that as compared to existing serial bit flipping decoding methods, the number of iterations required for convergence is reduced by 45% and the decoding time is reduced by 40%, by the use of proposed HWBF decoding. As compared to existing parallel bit flipping decoding methods, the proposed HWBF decoding can achieve similar bit error rate (BER) with same number of iterations and lesser computational complexity. Due to reduced number of decoding iterations, less computational complexity and reduced decoding time, the proposed HWBF decoding can be useful in energy sensitive mobile platforms.