Performance evaluation of LDPC codes in the presence of ISI with application to 10GBASE-T Ethernet

Low density party check (LDPC) codes are among the most powerful error control codes known. They can produce error correcting performance close to the Shannon limit and can be decoded using iterative decoding algorithms with linear complexity. These key advantages have made LDPC codes a candidate coding scheme for various novel applications and standards, such as 10GBASE-T Ethernet, in which both coding performance and implementation complexity are important considerations. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a recent LDPC code candidate for 10GBASE-T Ethernet, as well as a standard LDPC code, over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels with inter-symbol interference (ISI). We show that in comparison with AWGN, ISI introduces less performance degradation at the same level of signal-to-noise-and-interference ratio (SNIR). Given this SNIR scenario, we give simulation evidence that the performance of LDPC codes over ISI channels is upper-bounded by their performance over a AWGN channel. These results provide insight into the performance evaluation of LDPC codes in practical systems. In particular, the results allow us to characterize the equivalent AWGN for given amounts of ISI