Fast Decoding of Rate-Compatible Punctured LDPC Codes

While rate-compatible punctured low-density parity-check (RCP-LDPC) codes offer high flexibility in terms of code rate at a relatively low cost in implementation complexity, they are reported to require more decoding iterations than unpunctured LDPC codes. In this paper¹ we consider layered belief propagation decoding and propose efficient check node layering that significantly accelerates the decoding convergence of RCP-LDPC codes. We show that the proposed layering outperforms both random layering and conventional BP decoding. The performance improvements become more distinctive at high rates and they come at no additional implementation cost.