Design and Implementation of a Highly Efficient Quasi-Cyclic Low-Density Parity-Check Transceiving System Using an Overlapping Decoder

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Sep 12;23(18):7828. doi: 10.3390/s23187828.

Abstract

The traditional LDPC encoding and decoding system is characterized by low throughput and high resource consumption, making it unsuitable for use in cost-efficient, energy-saving sensor networks. Aiming to optimize coding complexity and throughput, this paper proposes a combined design of a novel LDPC code structure and the corresponding overlapping decoding strategies. With regard to structure of LDPC code, a CCSDS-like quasi-cyclic parity check matrix (PCM) with uniform distribution of submatrices is constructed to maximize overlap depth and adapt the parallel decoding. In terms of reception decoding strategies, we use a modified 2-bit Min-Sum algorithm (MSA) that achieves a coding gain of 5 dB at a bit error rate of 10-6 compared to an uncoded BPSK, further mitigating resource consumption, and which only incurs a slight loss compared to the standard MSA. Moreover, a shift-register-based memory scheduling strategy is presented to fully utilize the quasi-cyclic characteristic and shorten the read/write latency. With proper overlap scheduling, the time consumption can be reduced by one third per iteration compared to the non-overlap algorithm. Simulation and implementation results demonstrate that our decoder can achieve a throughput up to 7.76 Gbps at a frequency of 156.25 MHz operating eight iterations, with a two-thirds resource consumption saving.

Keywords: 2-bit quantification; FPGA; QC-LDPC; decoder; high-speed; overlap.

Grants and funding

This paper was supported by the the National Key Research and Development Program of China under No. 2019YFB1803200.