A modified belief propagation algorithm based on attenuation of the extrinsic LLR

In this paper, we propose a modification to Belief Propagation (BP) decoding algorithm for LDPC codes. The modification is to attenuate the check to bit extrinsic logarithm likelihood ratio by a factor a, when sudden sign change happens. This modification can be applied to both the standard BP algorithm and the joint row and column (JRC) BP algorithm. Simulation results show that the BER and WER performance of both traditional BP and JRC BP algorithms is improved by this method. The expense of the proposed modification is a slight increase in the average number of decoding iterations. ©2010 IEEE.