It is known that windowed decoding (WD) can effectively balance the performance and complexity of spatially coupled low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. In this study, we show that information can propagate in a wave-like manner at a constant speed under WD. Additionally, we provide an upper bound for the information propagation speed on the binary erasure channel, which can assist in designing the number of iterations required within each window.

In this study, we analyze the characteristics of scheduling sequences for layered belief propagation (LBP) that can result in efficient decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Specifically, we claim that scheduling sequences leading to high decoding efficiency should prioritize updating check nodes with lower error probabilities aggregated from neighboring variable nodes. We prove this conclusion separately on both the BEC and the BI-AWGN channels. Some observable characteristics in “good” scheduling sequences regarding row weights, rows connected to punctured columns, and column weights can serve as corollaries to this conclusion. By comprehensively considering these characteristics of good scheduling, we design a multi-sequence nested scheduling scheme of layered decoding for 5G New Radio (NR) LDPC codes. The proposed schemes can obtain scheduling sequences for various rates of rate-compatible LDPC codes using small hardware storage. What’s more, by respectively storing double-sequence, triple-sequence, or more sequences to obtain scheduling sequences at various code rates, a trade-off can be made between decoder storage and decoding performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves performance improvements compared to existing scheduling schemes at nearly all code rates.