GPU-based DVB-S2 LDPC decoder with high throughput and fast error floor detection

Abstract

A new strategy is proposed for implementing computationally intensive high-throughput decoders based on the long length irregular LDPC codes adopted in the DVB-S2 standard. It is supported on manycore graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures, for performing parallel multi-threaded decoding of multiple codewords with reduced accesses to global memory. This novel approach is flexible and scalable, and achieves throughputs superior to the 90 Mbit/s required by the DVB-S2 standard, while at the same time it improves error-correcting performances such as BER and error floors regarding conventional VLSI-based decoders.