A hybrid decoding scheme for short non-binary LDPC codes

In this paper, an iterative soft-decision hybrid decoding algorithm for non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with short codeword lengths is proposed. The rationale of the approach is to combine the classical belief propagation (BP) iterative LDPC decoding algorithm with the most reliable basis (MRB) decoding algorithm. This allows to achieve significant performance improvements, with a complexity that, for medium/low error rates, is only slightly higher than that of the BP algorithm alone. The performance improvement with respect to pure BP decoding is up to 0.7 dB at codeword error rate (CER) ≈ 1E-5. Notably, for a fixed MRB order, hybrid decoding achieves a gain up to 0.5 dB at CER ≈ 1E-5 with respect to BP decoding and MRB decoding used alone.