An algorithm for the estimation of the minimum distance of LDPC codes

The evaluation of the minimum distance of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes remains an open problem due to the rather large dimension of the parity check matrix H associated with any practical code. In this article, we propose an effective modification of the error impulse (EI) technique for estimation of the minimum distance of the LDPCs. The EI method is successfully applied to suboptimum decoding algorithms such as the iterative MAP decoding algorithm for turbo codes. We present novel modifications and extensions of this method to the suboptimum iterative sum-product algorithm for LDPCs. Simulation results validate the functionality of the proposed technique. Simulations focus on a particular class of LDPC codes, but our approach is general and applies to any LDPC code.