Improving the BP estimate over the AWGN channel using Tree-structured expectation propagation

In this paper, we propose the tree-structured expectation propagation (TEP) algorithm for low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoding over the binary additive white Gaussian noise (BI-AWGN) channel. By approximating the posterior distribution by a tree-structure factorization, the TEP has been proven to improve belief propagation (BP) decoding over the binary erasure channel (BEC). We show for the AWGN channel how the TEP decoder is also able to capture additional information disregarded by the BP solution, which leads to a noticeable reduction of the error rate for finite-length codes. We show that for the range of codes of interest, the TEP gain is obtained with a slight increase in complexity over that of the BP algorithm. An efficient way of constructing the tree-like structure is also described.