On Bit-Level Decoding of Nonbinary LDPC Codes

This paper addresses binary message-passing (MP) decoding for nonbinary low-density parity-check (NB-LDPC) codes based on the binary image of Galois field symbols. The parity-check matrix of NB-LDPC codes in binary form is used to perform MP. The corresponding nonbinary check node (CN) update and variable node (VN) update can thus be decomposed to a set of binary sub-CN updates and sub-VN updates with much lower computational complexity. In particular, we start from adapting the binary parity-check matrix with Gaussian elimination. Then, we add redundant rows to the parity-check matrix instead of adaptation to further improve the performance. A min-max operation based on the expanded matrix is proposed for the CN update. It not only decreases the computational complexity incurred by Gaussian elimination but also improves the error performance. Simulation results show that the bit-level decoding with min-max operation can achieve similar error performance as the extended min-sum algorithm, but the computational complexity can be lower than the min-sum algorithm for binary LDPC codes.