Tree-Structure Expectation Propagation for LDPC Decoding in Erasure Channels

Abstract

In this paper we present a new algorithm, denoted as TEP, to decode low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the Binary Erasure Channel (BEC). The TEP decoder is derived applying the expectation propagation (EP) algorithm with a tree- structured approximation. Expectation Propagation (EP) is a generalization to Belief Propagation (BP) in two ways. First, it can be used with any exponential family distribution over the cliques in the graph. Second, it can impose additional constraints on the marginal distributions. We use this second property to impose pair-wise marginal constraints in some check nodes of the LDPC code's Tanner graph. The algorithm has the same computational complexity than BP, but it can decode a higher fraction of errors when applied over the BEC. In this paper, we focus on the asymptotic performance of the TEP decoder, as the block size tends to infinity. We describe the TEP decoder by a set of differential equations that represents the residual graph evolution during the decoding process. The solution of these equations yields the capacity of this decoder for a given LDPC ensemble over the BEC. We show that the achieved capacity with the TEP is higher than the BP capacity, at the same computational complexity.