Stopping Redundancy Hierarchy Beyond the Minimum Distance

Stopping sets play a crucial role in failure events of iterative decoders over a binary erasure channel (BEC). The ℓth stopping redundancy is the minimum number of rows in the parity-check matrix of a code, which contains no stopping sets of size up to ℓ. In this paper, a notion of coverable stopping sets is defined. In order to achieve maximum-likelihood performance under iterative decoding over the BEC, the parity-check matrix should contain no coverable stopping sets of size ℓ, for 1 ≤ ℓ ≤ n-k, where n is the code length, k is the code dimension. By estimating the number of coverable stopping sets, we obtain upper bounds on the ℓth stopping redundancy, 1 ≤ ℓ ≤ n-k. The bounds are derived for both specific codes and code ensembles. In the range 1 ≤ ℓ ≤ d-1, for specific codes, the new bounds improve on the results in the literature. Numerical calculations are also presented.