Modified forced convergence decoding of LDPC codes with optimized decoder parameters

Reducing the complexity of decoding algorithms for LDPC codes is an important prerequisite for their practical implementation. In this work we propose a reduction of computational complexity targeting the highly reliable codeword bits and show that this approach can be seamlessly merged with the forced convergence scheme. We also show how the minimum achievable complexity of the resulting scheme for given performance constraints can be found by solving a constrained optimization problem, and successfully apply a gradient-descent based stochastic approximation (SA) method for solving this problem. The proposed methods are tested on LDPC codes from the IEEE 802.11n standard. Computational complexity reduction of 55% and a 75% reduction of memory access have been observed.