Improved Iterative Hard- and Soft-Reliability Based Majority-Logic Decoding Algorithms for Non-Binary Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

Non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have some advantages over their binary counterparts, but unfortunately their decoding complexity is a significant challenge. The iterative hard- and soft-reliability based majority-logic decoding algorithms are attractive for nonbinary LDPC codes, since they involve only finite field additions and multiplications as well as integer operations and, hence, have significantly lower complexity than other algorithms. In this paper, we propose two improvements to the majority-logic decoding algorithms. Instead of the accumulation of reliability information in the existing majority-logic decoding algorithms, our first improvement is a new reliability information update. The new update not only results in better error performance and fewer iterations on average, but also further reduces computational complexity. Since existing majority-logic decoding algorithms tend to have a high error floor for codes whose parity check matrices have low column weights, our second improvement is a reselection scheme, which leads to much lower error floors, at the expense of more finite field operations and integer operations, by identifying periodic points, reselecting intermediate hard decisions, and changing reliability information.