Performance analysis of protograph-based low-density parity-check codes with spatial diversity

In wireless communications, spatial diversity techniques, such as space-time block code and single-input multiple-output (SIMO), are employed to strengthen the robustness of the transmitted signal against channel fading. This article studies the performance of protograph-based low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with receive antenna diversity. The authors first propose a modified version of the protograph extrinsic information transfer algorithm and use it for deriving the threshold of the protograph codes in a SIMO system. The authors then calculate the decoding threshold and simulate the bit-error rate (BER) of two protograph codes (accumulate-repeat-by-3-accumulate (AR3A) code and accumulate-repeat-by-4-jagged-accumulate (AR4JA) code), a regular (3,6) LDPC code and two optimised irregular LDPC codes. The results reveal that the irregular codes achieve the best error performance in the low signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) region and the AR3A code outperforms all other codes in the high-SNR region. Utilising the theoretical analyses and the simulated results, the authors further discuss the effect of the diversity order on the performance of the protograph codes. Accordingly, the AR3A code stands out as a good candidate for wireless communication systems with multiple receive antennas.