Finding Leafless Elementary Trapping Sets and Elementary Absorbing Sets of LDPC Codes is Hard

Leafless elementary trapping sets (LETSs) are known to be the problematic structures in the error floor region of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the additive white Gaussian (AWGN) channel under iterative decoding algorithms. While problems involving the general category of trapping sets, and the subcategory of elementary trapping sets (ETSs), have been shown to be NP-hard, similar results for LETSs, which are a subset of ETSs, are not available. In this paper, we prove that, for a general LDPC code, finding a LETS of a given size α with minimum number of unsatisfied check nodes b is NP-hard to approximate with any guaranteed precision. We also prove that finding the minimum size a of a LETS with a given b is NP-hard to approximate. Similar results are proved for elementary absorbing sets, a popular subcategory of LETSs.