Patent ID: 6842872

Claim:
A method for evaluating and optimizing an error-correcting code to be transmitted through a noisy channel and to be decoded by an iterative message-passing decoder, comprising: representing the error-correcting code by a parity check matrix; modeling the parity check matrix as a bipartite graph having a plurality of variable nodes and check nodes; providing a set of message passing rules for the decoder; analyzing the decoder to obtain a set of density evolution rules including operators and operands; transforming the operators to projective operators and the operands to projected operands to generate a set of projective message passing rules, wherein the projected operand is in the form of a projected polynomial; and iteratively applying the projective message passing rules to the error-correcting code modeled by the bipartite graph until a termination condition is reached; and determining error rates of selected bits of the error-correcting code by evaluating the corresponding operands.