Application of the method of equivalent message encoding structures to simplify coding complexity
Authors: Astakhov N.V. , Bashkirov A.V. , Makarov O.Yu. , Demikhova A.S. , Chepelev M.Yu. 
Published: November 2023

Formulation of the problem. Modern telecommunication technologies make it possible to transmit data over long distances with limitations in the form of low power consumption and low error rate using error correction codes. The use of such codes plays an important role and is necessary to detect and correct errors caused by signal distortion and noise in the communication channel. According to Shannon's channel coding theorem, the probability of error can be arbitrarily small or close to zero if the encoding rate of transmission R is less than or equal to the bandwidth of channel C. Assuming that the bandwidth C is achievable, we can calculate the minimum signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) to achieve zero error, or an arbitrarily small error called the Shannon limit, while maintaining R ≤ C. This article discusses a method of applying equivalent message encoding structures to construct low-density parity-checking (LDPC) codes. Low-density parity-checking (LDPC) codes are a class of linear block codes in which the complexity of iterative decoding increases linearly with increasing block length. Standard LDPC codes without modifications are considered to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which is expected to provide high encoding speed when transmitting messages with a short block length. The method of obtaining equivalent structures allows: to reduce the computational complexity of encoding and decoding; to provide the possibility of finding a new encoding scheme and evaluating its effectiveness. The validity of the method for obtaining equivalent message encoding structures is evaluated by modeling the bit error rate (BER) of LDPC codes. Purpose. to show the effectiveness of the use of equivalent structures for various methods of compression of transmitted information, to minimize the complexity of encoding, while maintaining energy efficiency, correcting ability and data transfer rate. Results. A method is considered for obtaining equivalent message element encoding structures that can be used to create more LDPC codes for data transmission applications with a short block length. The cascade principle of constructing an equivalent generator and a parity check matrix was analyzed, which also leads to minimizing the computational complexity of the encoder and decoder. An equivalent structure G can be obtained from cascading two (or more) matrices by modifying the second matrix so that it has a unit matrix with the size of the parity check length and a shift to the right by k bits. On the other hand, the equivalent structure H can be obtained by simply cascading directly the second matrix and shifting to the right by k bits. According to the simulation results, the proposed method is adequate, since LDPC codes have the same BER characteristics as codes based on the low density generator matrix (LDGM). During the simulation, it was concluded that the SPC codes (single parity check (single parity check (SPC)) are the most efficient codes (for a given block length), since SPC codes have the smallest interval up to the Shannon limit. Practical significance. The results presented in this article will give a new insight into the development of simple channel coding of LDPC codes of short block length with high encoding speed for future applications with lower power consumption.