A Unified Early Stopping Criterion for Binary and Nonbinary LDPC Codes Based on Check-Sum Variation Patterns

In order to detect uncorrectable error frames and early terminate their iterative belief-propagation (BP) decoding for binary or nonbinary LDPC codes, a unified early stopping criterion using check-sum variation patterns is proposed. In addition to low computational overhead and easy choice of threshold parameters, it can be adapted to different channels. Simulation results show that the proposed criterion greatly reduces the average number of iterations (ANI) at low to medium signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) while keeping the error performance degradation negligible over a wide SNR region.