We study the stability of low-density parity-check codes under blockwise or bitwise maximuma posterioridecoding, where transmission takes place over a binary-input memoryless output-symmetric channel. Our study stems from the consideration of constructing universal capacity-achieving codes under low-complexity decoding algorithms, where universality refers to the fact that we are considering a family of channels with equal capacity. Consider, e.g., the right-regular sequence by Shokrollahi and the heavy-tail Poisson sequence by Lubyet al. Both sequences are provably capacity-achieving under belief propagation decoding when transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. In this paper we show that many existing capacity-achieving sequences of low-density parity-check codes are not universal under belief propagation decoding. We reveal that the key to showing this non-universality result is determined by the stability of the underlying codes. More concretely, for an ordered and complete channel family and a sequence of low-density parity-check code ensembles, we determine a stability threshold associated with them, which gives rise to a sufficient condition under which the sequence is not universal under belief propagation decoding. Moreover, we show that the same stability threshold applies to blockwise or bitwise maximuma posterioridecoding as well. We demonstrate how the stability threshold can determine an upper bound on the corresponding blockwise or bitwise maximuma posteriorithreshold, revealing the operational significance of the stability threshold.

We determine the stability condition of low-density parity-check codes under both bitwise and blockwise maximum a posteriori decoding. As a consequence, we prove that the stability condition determines an upper bound on both the bitwise and the blockwise maximum a posteriori threshold.

Spatially coupled codes have been shown to achieve the capacity for a large class of channels universally. Many variants of such codes have been introduced to date. We discuss a further such variant that is particularly simple and is determined by a very small number of parameters. More precisely, we consider and ensemble of time-invariant low-density parity-check convolutional codes with very large constraint lengths. We show via simulations that, despite their extreme simplicity, such codes still show the threshold saturation behavior known from the spatially coupled codes discussed in the literature. Further, we show how the size of the typical minimum stopping set is related to basic parameters of the code. Due to their simplicity and good performance, these codes might be attractive from an implementation perspective.

Given a family of binary-input memoryless output-symmetric (BMS) channels having a fixed capacity, we derive the BMS channel having the highest (resp. lowest) capacity among all channels that are degraded (resp. upgraded) with respect to the whole family. We give an explicit characterization of this channel as well as an explicit formula for the capacity of this channel.