On Implementation of Min-Sum Algorithm and Its Modifications for Decoding Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) Codes

The effects of clipping and quantization on the performance of the min-sum algorithm for the decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes at short and intermediate block lengths are studied. It is shown that in many cases, only four quantization bits suffice to obtain close to ideal performance over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios. Moreover, we propose modifications to the min-sum algorithm that improve the performance by a few tenths of a decibel with just a small increase in decoding complexity. A quantized version of these modified algorithms is also studied. It is shown that, when optimized, modified quantized min-sum algorithms perform very close to, and in some cases even slightly outperform, the ideal belief-propagation algorithm at observed error rates.