A New Importance Sampling Algorithm for Fast Simulation of Linear Block Codes over BSCs

In this paper, we propose an Importance Sampling (IS) scheme for fast simulation of linear block codes over binary symmetric channels (BSCs). By re-formulating the IS problem into the one-dimensional Hamming weight space, we propose a novel IS estimator and derive the optimal IS distribution which will minimize the variance of the estimator. Consequently, a corresponding iterative algorithm is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed IS algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art IS algorithm is demonstrated in the word error rate simulation of both LDPC and Polar codes.