On the Effects of Colored Noise on the Performance of LDPC Codes

The class of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes includes some of the most powerful capacity-approaching codes reported to date. As a result, LDPC codes have been considered for many new communication applications. However, a better understanding of the effects of the signal impairments that exist in such applications is required. In this paper, the performance of various LDPC codes, including recent candidate LDPC codes for 10GBASE-T Ethernet, in the presence of colored noise is evaluated and compared with the effects of conventional additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The colored noise models in this study include high-frequency and low-frequency additive colored Gaussian noise (ACGN), and 1/f noise. The results show that LDPC codes are more vulnerable to colored noise than to AWGN and as the correlation between noise samples becomes stronger, their performance becomes more degraded. However, at the same level of colored noise power, the performance is increasingly degraded as noise correlation is spread over more noise samples