Breaking the Trapping Sets in LDPC Codes: Check Node Removal and Collaborative Decoding

Trapping sets strongly degrade performance of low-density parity check (LDPC) codes in the low-error-rate region. This creates significant difficulties for the deployment of LDPC codes to low-error-rate applications such as storage and wireless systems with no or limited retransmission options. We propose a novel technique for breaking trapping sets based on collaborative decoding that utilizes two different decoding modes. While the main decoding mode executes message passing based on the original parity check matrix of the corresponding LDPC code, the sub-decoding mode operates on a modified parity check matrix formed by removing a portion of check nodes in the factor graph representation of the given code. The modified parity check matrix is designed to promote a passing of correct information into erroneous variable nodes in the trapping set. Theoretical properties of the proposed trapping-set-breaking technique have been established based on the notion of the improved separation for the trapped variable nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed collaborative LDPC decoding scheme switching between the two decoding modes back and forth effectively breaks dominant trapping sets of various known types of regular and irregular LDPC codes.