Performance evaluation of irregular low-density parity-check codes at high signal-to-noise ratio

Elementary trapping sets (ETSs) have been found to be the main cause of error floor in the decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Moreover, irregular LDPC codes that avoid harmful [w; u; e] ETSs have been constructed and have shown to possess superior error performance compared with other LDPC codes. In this paper, we attempt to evaluate irregular LDPC code performance under an additive white Gaussian noise channel within the high SNR region using the importance sampling (IS) approach in conjunction with the identification of [w; u; e] ETSs. For any given irregular LDPC code, we will first apply a three-step method that aims to search as many ETSs within the code as possible. Then, we will classify these ETSs into different groups based on their labels, i.e., [w; u; e]'s. Further, by dividing the error region into various sub-regions centered by ETSs, we apply the IS simulator to evaluate the error rate of each of the sub-regions. Based on the error rates of all the sub-regions, we can estimate the overall error rate of the LDPC code. Results have indicated that our proposed IS scheme can produce speed-up gains up to 3.9×10⁹ times compared to Monte Carlo simulations. © 2011 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.