On Minimal Pseudocodewords of Binary Hamming Codes

Pseudocodewords, and in particular minimal pseudocodewords, play an important role in understanding the performance of linear programming (LP) decoding. In this paper, we investigate minimal pseudocodewords of binary Hamming codes described by full-rank parity-check matrices. We first provide some general results on minimal pseudocodewords with support size 3 of a binary parity-check matrix. We also prove a lower bound on the minimum binary symmetric channel (BSC) pseudoweight of a binary parity-check matrix. Then we prove that a full-rank parity-check matrix of a binary Hamming code has minimal pseudocodewords of certain types whose support sizes are larger than 3. Interestingly enough, the BSC pseudoweight of all these minimal pseudocodewords is 2. Using this fact as well as the above-mentioned lower bound, we further prove that a full-rank parity-check matrix of a binary Hamming code has minimum BSC pseudoweight 2. Moreover, the additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGNC) pseudoweight of all these minimal pseudocodewords is 3. Based on numerical observations, we conjecture that a full-rank parity-check matrix of a binary Hamming code has minimum AWGNC pseudoweight 3. Finally, we provide more properties of a subset of minimal pseudocodewords of a full-rank parity-check matrix of a binary Hamming code.