Effective bi-directional overlapped sliding window decoding of SC-LDPC codes

Abstract

In this paper, a bi-directional sliding window decoder is proposed for spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes, which improves the decoding complexity and performance compared to the conventional sliding window decoding (SWD) by sharing messages at the overlapped part of forward and backward decoding windows. Moreover, by using proper scaling factors that determine the weight of each message at the overlapped part of two sliding windows, good local decoding effects can be efficiently spread out to both ends of SC-LDPC code during decoding process. Such effective message updates of the proposed bi-directional overlapped sliding window decoding (BO-SWD) improve error floor performance compared to the conventional SWD. The validity of BO-SWD is verified by simulation with various SC-LDPC ensembles.