A hybrid low complexity decoding of LDPC codes

An efficient early stopping criterion based on the evolution of the number of reliable variable nodes (NRVN) is proposed for low density parity check (LDPC) codes in this paper. This criterion can significantly reduce the average number of iterations (ANI) at low to middle signal to noise ratios (SNRs) with minimal performance degradation. Furthermore, a hybrid decoding method is presented to reduce the decoding complexity of LDPC codes by combining the proposed stopping criterion and forced convergence (FC) decoding algorithm. Compared with the classic belief propagation (BP) decoding, significant computation complexity reduction can be achieved with small computation overhead.