Decoding of 5G NR Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been selected as the channel coding scheme for 5G NR standard, which have excellent performance approaching the Shannon limit and are easy to implement in hardware. The decoding algorithm and scheduling scheme of LDPC codes have a significant impact on performance. The row degree (RD) and the number of punctured bits (PBs) are widely used to determine the update order of layers. In this letter, we used Matlab to simulate the error performance of the 5G LDPC codes. We completed the bit error rate and frame error rate simulations of six different decoding algorithms, including flooding LLR-BP, flooding NMS, layered LLR-BP, layered NMS, the lowest degree and least-punctured (LD-LP) layered LLR-BP and LD-LP layered NMS methods, for the 5G LDPC code with a base graph of size [46, 68], code rate 1/3, and code length of 1584.We further compared the performance of LD-LP layered decoding and LP-LD layered decoding. Moreover, we simulated the error performance of the core part of the LDPC code, which consists of four layers. We evaluated the effect of the update order of the four layers on the error performance of the code, and concluded that some update orders might give slightly better error performance than others.