Evaluation of the robustness of LDPC encoders to hardware noise

Abstract

This paper analyzes the robustness of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) encoders on faulty hardware. The faulty hardware effect on the encoder is represented by an error model at the XOR gate level. We review the existing LDPC encoding solutions in the works of Richardson and Urbante (2001) and Chen et al. (2005) and the code constructions in the works of Ping et al. (2001), Jin et al. (2000), and Garcia-Frias and Zhong (2003) that guarantee low encoding complexity. For each of the existing solutions, we provide the analytic expression of the encoding error probability, and we use it to evaluate the robustness of the encoders to hardware noise. We then identify the two best encoding solutions in terms of robustness and we compare their performance with Monte-Carlo simulations.