DAVINCI non-binary LDPC codes: Performance and complexity assessment

Non-Binary Low Density Parity Check (NB-LDPC) codes are expected to reduce the performance gap between binary LDPC and Turbo Codes for both short and medium length codewords, retaining in both cases the best of each. This paper presents the performance evaluation of NB-LDPC when compared to state-of-art channel coding techniques, namely Convolutional Turbo Codes (CTC) and Quasi-Cyclic LDPC. The performance evaluation is twofold: first at the link level and then at system level. In both analyses, it has been shown that the NB-LDPC codes outperform the benchmark codes giving a Signal to Noise Ratio gain up to 0.5 dB and improving the average throughput 5%. Besides, a complexity analysis is also provided for NB-LDPC showing that, using a low complexity decoder, the complexity is approximately one order of magnitude above that required in case of CTC or QC-LDPC. Copyright © 2010 The authors