Decoding Rate-Compatible 5G-LDPC Codes With Coarse Quantization Using the Information Bottleneck Method

Increased data rates and very low-latency requirements place strict constraints on the computational complexity of channel decoders in the new 5G communications standard. Practical low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder implementations use message-passing decoding with finite precision, which becomes coarse as complexity is more severely constrained. In turn, performance degrades as the precision becomes more coarse. Recently, the information bottleneck (IB) method was used to design mutual-information-maximizing mappings that replace conventional finite-precision node computations. As a result, the exchanged messages in the IB approach can be represented with a very small number of bits. 5G LDPC codes have the so-called protograph-based raptor-like (PBRL) structure which offers inherent rate-compatibility and excellent performance. This paper extends the IB principle to the flexible class of PBRL LDPC codes as standardized in 5G. The extensions include IB decoder design for puncturing and rate-compatibility. In contrast to existing IB decoder design techniques, the proposed decoder can be used for a large range of code rates with a static set of optimized mappings. The proposed construction approach is evaluated for a typical range of code rates and bit resolutions ranging from 3 bit to 5 bit. Frame error rate simulations show that the proposed scheme always outperforms min-sum decoding algorithms and operates close to double-precision sum-product belief propagation decoding. Furthermore, alternatives to the lookup table implementations of the mutual-information-maximizing mappings are investigated.