3D EXIT Charts for Analyzing the 5G 3GPP New Radio LDPC Decoder

Abstract

Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes have been selected to provide channel coding for data in the next generation of wireless communication standard referred to in practice as the 3GPP New Radio (NR). In contrast to the LDPC codes adopted in previous standards, the NR LDPC code can be considered to be a concatenation of a core LDPC code and a Low Density Generator Matrix (LDGM) code. This particular feature has the advantage of offering flexible coding rate, but it prevents the application of conventional extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis. This paper characterizes this problem and addresses it using a novel reinterpretation of the NR LDPC factor graph. Based on this factor graph, a novel 3D EXIT chart technique is conceived for our three-stage scheme, which facilitates the visual characterisation of the NR LDPC decoder's iterative decoding convergence process for the first time. The proposed EXIT chart analysis accurately visualizes the mutual information exchange amongst the components of the NR LDPC decoder, which was not facilitated by the conventional 2D EXIT chart. We demonstrate the power of this technique by using it to design a novel iterative decoding activation order for the NR LDPC decoder, which reduces the decoding complexity by approximately 17% compared to a conventional flooding decoder. This is achieved without degrading its error correction capability. We conclude by discussing several other opportunities for exploiting the proposed 3D EXIT chart technique to improve the design of concatenated LDPC and LDGM codes. INDEX TERMS NR LDPC code, EXIT chart analysis, NR LDPC Decoder design.