New stopping criteria for iterative decoding of LDPC codes in H‐ARQ systems

Under severely unreliable channel, decoding of error‐correcting codes frequently fails, which requires a lot of computational complexity, especially, in the iterative decoding algorithm. In hybrid automatic repeat request systems, most of computation power is wasted on failed decoding if a codeword is retransmitted many times. Therefore, early stopping of iterative decoding needs to be adopted. In this paper, we propose a new stopping algorithm of iterative belief propagation decoding for low‐density parity‐check codes, which is effective on both high and low signal‐to‐noise ratio ranges and scalable to variable code rate and length. The proposed stopping algorithm combines several good stopping criteria. Each criterion is extremely simple and will not be a burden to the overall system. With the proposed stopping algorithm, it is shown via numerical analysis that the decoding complexity of hybrid automatic repeat request system with adaptive modulation and coding scheme can be fairly reduced. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.