A study on quick simulation for estimation of low FER of LDPC codes

Abstract

This study shows a new design method of a simulation probability density function (PDF) for a fast frame error rate (FER) evaluation of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. It is difficult to evaluate a very low FER of LDPC codes by Monte Carlo simulation methods since it has excellent performance under iterative decoding. Cole et al. proposed a three-step estimation method of the low FER of LDPC codes of moderate block length. By applying the importance sampling method, which is one of the fast simulation methods, the simulation time of the error performance of LDPC codes can be reduced. Another simulation PDF, which can treat more dominant trapping sets (TS) than Cole et al.'s method, is proposed. The selection of the dominant TS as proportional to its probability reduces the number of simulation runs without deteriorating the accuracy of the estimator. Unbiased estimator is given as well as that that of the Cole et al.'s method. Some numerical examples are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulation time for an LDPC code of length 504 is reduced to 1/10 when we evaluate FER of around 10−14.