Design of Irregular LDPC Codes with Optimized Performance-Complexity Tradeoff

The optimal performance-complexity tradeoff for error-correcting codes at rates strictly below the Shannon limit is a central question in coding theory. This paper proposes a numerical approach for the minimization of decoding complexity for long-block-length irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The proposed design methodology is applicable to any binary-input memoryless symmetric channel and any iterative message-passing decoding algorithm with a parallel-update schedule. A key feature of the proposed optimization method is a new complexity measure that incorporates both the number of operations required to carry out a single decoding iteration and the number of iterations required for convergence. This paper shows that the proposed complexity measure can be accurately estimated from a density-evolution and extrinsic-information transfer chart analysis of the code. A sufficient condition is presented for convexity of the complexity measure in the variable edge-degree distribution; when it is not satisfied, numerical experiments nevertheless suggest that the local minimum is unique. The results presented herein show that when the decoding complexity is constrained, the complexity-optimized codes significantly outperform threshold-optimized codes at long block lengths, within the ensemble of irregular codes.