Block Markov superposition transmission of LDPC codes

In this paper, based on the block Markov superposition transmission (BMST) technique, we present a new class of coupled low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for the transport block (TB)-based transmission to improve the error-correcting performance. For encoding, the previous LDPC codewords corresponding to a TB (at prior time slot) are interleaved and superimposed onto the current LDPC codewords, resulting in the transmitted codewords. For decoding, the sliding window decoding algorithm with sum-product or min-sum implementations can be employed, inheriting a relatively low-latency decoding. A distinguished advantage of the proposed coded transmission over spatially coupled LDPC (SC-LDPC) codes is that the encoder/decoder of the proposed codes can be designed by reusing the encoder/decoder architecture of component block LDPC codes. To analyze the waterfall performance of BMST-LDPC code ensembles, we present the protograph-based EXIT chart analysis, which can efficiently predict the error-correcting performance in waterfall region. To analyze the error-floor performance of BMST-LDPC codes, we employ the genie-aided (GA) lower bound, which can efficiently predict the error-correcting performance in error-floor region. For ease of implementation, the BMST-LDPC codes are constructed by taking the (2, 4)-raptor-like LDPC codes or the 5G LDPC codes as the basic components. The numerical results reveal that the proposed codes can have capacity-approaching performance, exhibiting a gap of 0.007 ​dB away from the corresponding Shannon limit. They also reveal that, by using the proposed BMST construction, the error-correcting performance of the original 5G block LDPC codes can be significantly improved, achieving coding gains up to one dB over the AWGN channels and two dB over the fast fading channels.