Information-theoretic lower bounds on the bit error probability of codes on graphs

Abstract

We present lower bounds on the bit error probability of binary linear block codes, and on the gap between the channel capacity and the rate of these codes for which reliable communica- tion is achievable. The results are valid for memo- ryless binary-input output-symmetric (MBIOS) chan- nels. The lower bounds provide a quantitative mea- sure for the number of cycles of bipartite graphs which represent good error-correcting codes. The tightness of the lower bounds is especially pronounced for the binary erasure channel (BEC); to this end, we analyze a sequence of ensembles of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes which closely approach these bounds. I. Introduction If a linear block code can be represented by a cycle-free fac- tor graph which only includes variable nodes and parity-check nodes, then maximum-likelihood soft decision decoding can be performed with low complexity (1). Theorem 5 in (1) indicates that these graphs represent codes with very poor minimum distance. The bounds in (1) only refer to the minimum dis- tance of cycle-free codes, and in this work we derive lower bounds on the bit error probability and the gap to capacity for codes on graphs which are represented by bipartite graphs (with or without cycles). We derive in this work information- theoretic lower bounds on the bit error probability of a binary linear code used over MBIOS channels. The bounds are ex- pressed in terms of the density of an arbitrary parity-check matrix which represents the binary linear code (i.e., the num- ber of ones in the matrix normalized per information bit), and they are valid for codes whose bipartite graphs are with or without cycles. We introduce a quantitative measure for the cycles in a bipartite graph which represents a binary lin- ear code (where the graph only includes variable nodes and parity-check nodes). The bounds provide an interpretation for the tradeofi which exists between the bit error proba- bility and gap to capacity of an arbitrary LDPC code (i.e., its performance limitations), and the density of an arbitrary parity-check matrix which represents the code (where the lat- ter afiects the decoding complexity per information bit and per iteration, under a message-passing iterative decoding al- gorithm). We present in this work quantitative results which indicate that in order to approach the channel capacity with vanishing bit error probability, LDPC codes should not have too sparse parity-check matrices, as otherwise their inherent gap to capacity becomes large. In fact, we show that the density of any parity-check matrix and the fundamental num- ber of cycles of the graph which represents the code should increase at least like log 1 where designates the gap to ca- pacity under iterative message-passing decoding (see (2), (3)). The tightness of the lower bounds which are derived in this work (and whose validity is for any sequence of codes with 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5