Mathematical programming is a branch of applied mathematics and has recently been used to derive new decoding approaches, challenging established but often heuristic algorithms based on iterative message passing. Concepts from mathematical programming used in the context of decoding include linear, integer, and nonlinear programming, network flows, notions of duality as well as matroid and polyhedral theory. This paper reviews and categorizes decoding methods based on mathematical programming approaches for binary linear codes over binary-input memoryless symmetric channels.

For binary linear codes with short and medium block length ML decoding can be achieved by solving the associated integer programming (IP) problem with a general purpose solver. IP also offers algorithms for computing the minimum distance. In this article, we present several IP formulations and computationally compare them on various LDPC and BCH codes. Most of these formulations are obtained by forcing integrality on linear programming (LP) decoding formulations proposed in the literature.

Maximum likelihood (ML) decoding is the optimal decoding algorithm for arbitrary linear block codes and can be written as an integer programming (IP) problem. Feldman relaxed this IP problem and presented linear programming (LP) based decoding. In this paper, we propose a new separation algorithm to improve the error-correcting performance of LP decoding for binary linear block codes. We use an IP formulation with indicator variables that help in detecting the violated parity checks. We derive Gomory cuts from the IP and use them in our separation algorithm. An efficient method of finding cuts induced by redundant parity checks (RPC) is also proposed. Under certain circumstances we can guarantee that these RPC cuts are valid and cut off the fractional optimal solutions of LP decoding. It is demonstrated on three LDPC codes and two BCH codes that our separation algorithm performs significantly better than LP decoding and belief propagation (BP) decoding.

We study an integer programming (IP) based separation approach to find the maximum likelihood (ML) codeword for binary linear codes. An algorithm introduced in Tanatmis et al. is extended and improved with respect to decoding performance without increasing the worst case complexity. This is demonstrated on the LDPC and the BCH code classes. Moreover, we propose an integer programming formulation to calculate the minimum distance of a binary linear code. We exemplarily compute the minimum distance of the (204, 102) LDPC code and the (576, 288) WIMAX code. Using the minimum distance of a code, a new class of valid inequalities is introduced.