This paper presents an analytically designed layered decoding algorithm for quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes in the 5th Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) mobile communication system. First, a layered density evolution (DE) based on reciprocal channel approximation (RCA) is newly developed to accurately reflect the layered decoding operation in the decoder design. Using this technique, a single nested sequence is optimized in a greedy way to configure the processing order for any given number of layers. The error-correction performance is improved by up to 0.15 dB, while the number of iterations is reduced by about one simultaneously.

This paper presents density evolution (DE) techniques based on reciprocal channel approximation (RCA) for general bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) systems. The original RCA-based DE (RCA-DE) technique is implemented under the assumption of binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channels (BI-AWGNCs). In BICM systems, however,$M$-ary modulation schemes are generally used, and they can be regarded as to be a parallel transmission of$\log _{2} M$bits. Thus,$\log _{2} M$separate bit-level channels, which are not Gaussian equivalent, need to be considered. In order to extend the conventional RCA-DE technique to BICM systems, we first establish a model of protograph BICM ensembles. Two methods are developed based on the bit error rate (BER) and the BICM capacity in order to find a corresponding BI-AWGNC that models each of the bit-level channels. Using these methods, we implement the protograph RCA-DE technique for BICM systems and show that it achieves an accurate estimation. As a practical application of the proposed RCA-DE method, we design bit interleavers in order to achieve better BICM performance in the 3GPP New Radio (NR) LDPC coding system. Numerical results show that performance gain of up to 0.3 dB is consistently achieved over a wide range of parameter values.

In this paper, we investigate the fundamentals of puncturing and shortening for polar codes, based on binary domination which plays a key role in polar code construction. We first prove that the orders of encoder input bits to be made incapable (by puncturing) or to be shortened are governed by binary domination. In particular, we show that binary domination completely determines incapable or shortened bit patterns for polar codes, and that all the possible incapable or shortened bit patterns can be identified. We then present the patterns of the corresponding encoder output bits to be punctured or fixed, when the incapable or shortened bits are given.

In this paper, we investigate the fundamentals of puncturing and shortening for polar codes, based on binary domination. For punctured and shortened polar codes, we prove that the partial order by binary domination completely determines both incapable bit patterns (by puncturing) and fixed bit patterns (by shortening). In particular, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for an encoder output bit to be fixed by additionally shortening a single encoder input bit, as well as a necessary and sufficient condition for an encoder input bit to be made incapable by additionally puncturing a single encoder output bit. We also identify all the puncturing bit patterns yielding a given incapable bit pattern. These results provide a guidance to design a practical rate-matching scheme for polar codes. As an example, we present a rate-matching scheme based on our analytical observations. Numerical results show that it performs well over a wide range of code lengths and rates, compared with conventional rate-matching schemes.

Short cycles in the Tanner graph of a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code may cause a severe performance degradation. In this paper, we investigate the cycle properties of quasi-cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) codes. We first analyze a necessary and sufficient condition for a cycle of a given length to exist, by using the sequence representation of a parity-check matrix for a QC-LDPC code. We then derive bounds which are necessary conditions for a QC-LDPC code to have a given girth in terms of its parameters. Our necessary conditions are applicable to any regular or irregular QC-LDPC codes as well as they improve the existing bounds for many classes of regular QC-LDPC codes.

In this paper, we investigate the cycle properties of quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes. Using the sequence representation of a parity-check matrix for a QC-LDPC code, we analyze a necessary and sufficient condition for a cycle of a given length to exist. We then derive bounds which are necessary conditions for a QC-LDPC code to have a given girth in terms of its parameters. We also give a bound which is a sufficient condition for a QC-LDPC code of a given girth to be constructed by a greedy algorithm. The bounds derived here are applicable to any regular or irregular QC-LDPC codes as well as they improve the existing bounds in many classes of regular LDPC codes.

In this paper we investigate the cycle properties of regular quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes. Using the sequence representation, we analyze the conditions for short cycles to exist in regular QC-LDPC codes and then give necessary conditions for avoiding short cycles in terms of their parameters. Numerical results show that our bounds on the number of rows in the parity-check matrices for regular QC-LDPC codes without cycles of length 4 or 6 are tighter than any other known bounds.