Design and Implementation of a Highly Efficient Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check Transceiving System Using an Overlapping Decoder

Abstract

The traditional LDPC encoding and decoding system is characterized by low throughput and high resource consumption, making it unsuitable for use in cost-efficient, energy-saving sensor networks. Aiming to optimize coding complexity and throughput, this paper proposes a combined design of a novel LDPC code structure and the corresponding overlapping decoding strategies. With regard to structure of LDPC code, a CCSDS-like quasi-cyclic parity check matrix (PCM) with uniform distribution of submatrices is constructed to maximize overlap depth and adapt the parallel decoding. In terms of reception decoding strategies, we use a modified 2-bit Min-Sum algorithm (MSA) that achieves a coding gain of 5 dB at a bit error rate of 10−6 compared to an uncoded BPSK, further mitigating resource consumption, and which only incurs a slight loss compared to the standard MSA. Moreover, a shift-register-based memory scheduling strategy is presented to fully utilize the quasi-cyclic characteristic and shorten the read/write latency. With proper overlap scheduling, the time consumption can be reduced by one third per iteration compared to the non-overlap algorithm. Simulation and implementation results demonstrate that our decoder can achieve a throughput up to 7.76 Gbps at a frequency of 156.25 MHz operating eight iterations, with a two-thirds resource consumption saving.