Edge-Based Dynamic Scheduling for Belief-Propagation Decoding of LDPC and RS Codes

This paper presents two low-complexity edge-based scheduling schemes, referred to as the e-Flooding and e-Shuffled schedules, for the belief-propagation (BP) decoding of low-density parity-check and Reed–Solomon codes. The proposed schedules selectively update the edges of the code graph based on the run-time reliability of variable and check nodes. Specifically, new message update is propagated exclusively along the unreliable edges of the code graph. This reduces the decoding complexity of BP algorithm as only a partial set of message updates is computed per decoding iteration. Besides, restricting the flow of message updates may also precludes the occurrence of some short graph cycles, which helps to preserve the BP message independence at certain variable and check nodes. Using numerical simulations, it is shown that the proposed edge-based schedules reduce the BP decoding complexity by more than 90% compared with the prior-art BP schedules, while simultaneously improving the error-rate performance, at medium-to-high signal-to-noise ratio over additive white Gaussian noise channel.