Efficient Near Maximum-Likelihood Reliability-Based Decoding for Short LDPC Codes

In this paper, we propose an efficient decoding algorithm for short low-density parity check (LDPC) codes by carefully combining the belief propagation (BP) decoding and ordered statistics decoding (OSD) algorithms. Specifically, a modified BP (mBP) algorithm is applied for a certain number of iterations prior to OSD to enhance the reliability of the received message, where an offset parameter is utilized in mBP to control the weight of the extrinsic information in message passing. By carefully selecting the offset parameter and the number of mBP iterations, the number of errors in the most reliable positions (MRPs) in OSD can be reduced by mBP, thereby significantly improving the overall decoding performance of error rate and complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can approach the maximum-likelihood decoding (MLD) for short LDPC codes with only a slight increase in complexity compared to BP and a significant decrease compared to OSD. Specifically, the order- (m -1) decoding of the proposed algorithm can achieve the performance of the order-m OSD.