Minimum-Variance Importance Sampling Estimator for Fast Simulation of Linear Block Codes over Binary Erasure Channels

In this paper, the problem of efficiently evaluating the error performance of linear block codes over binary erasure channels (BECs) is considered. We propose a novel importance sampling (IS) estimator by deriving the optimal IS distribution of the erasure pattern size. Consequently, a corresponding iterative algorithm for fast simulation purpose is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed IS algorithm compared to Monte Carlo simulation is demonstrated in estimating the block erasure rate of low-density parity-check codes, and IS gains of almost ten orders of magnitude is achieved.