A High Throughput Efficient Approach for Decoding LDPC Codes onto GPU Devices

Low density parity check (LDPC) decoding process is known as compute intensive. This kind of digital communication applications was recently implemented onto graphic processing unit (GPU) devices for LDPC code performance estimation and/or for real-time measurements. Overall previous studies about LDPC decoding on GPU were based on the implementation of the flooding-based decoding algorithm that provides massive computation parallelism. More efficient layered schedules were proposed in literature because decoder iteration can be split into sublayer iterations. These schedules seem to badly fit onto GPU devices due to restricted computation parallelism and complex memory access patterns. However, the layered schedules enable the decoding convergence to speed up by two. In this letter, we show that: 1) layered schedule can be efficiently implemented onto a GPU device; and 2) this approach—implemented onto a low-cost GPU device—provides higher throughputs with identical correction performances (BER) compared to previously published results.