Q-ary LDPC decoder with euclidean-distance-based sorting criterion

Q-ary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, compared with binary ones, produce a better error performance but with a higher decoding complexity. Various solutions, such as speeding up single operations or reducing the total number of operations, have been proposed for accelerating the decoding process. In this letter, we propose a modification to the extended min-sum (EMS) decoding algorithm. The aim is to improve the decoding speed without sacrificing any error performance over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel environment.