Tree-Structured Expectation Propagation for Decoding Finite-Length LDPC Codes

In this paper, we propose Tree-structured Expectation Propagation (TEP) algorithm to decode finite-length Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes. The TEP decoder is able to continue decoding once the standard Belief Propagation (BP) decoder fails, presenting the same computational complexity as the BP decoder. The BP algorithm is dominated by the presence of stopping sets (SSs) in the code graph. We show that the TEP decoder, without previous knowledge of the graph, naturally avoids some fairly common SSs. This results in a significant improvement in the system performance.