Low-Latency Software LDPC Decoders for x86 Multi-core Devices

LDPC codes are a family of error correcting codes used in most modern digital communication standards even in future 3GPP 5G standard. Thanks to their high processing power and their parallelization capabilities, prevailing multi-core and many-core devices facilitate real-time implementations of digital communication systems, which were previously implemented on dedicated hardware targets. Through massive frame decoding parallelization, current LDPC decoders throughputs range from hundreds of Mbps up to Gbps. However, inter-frame parallelization involves latency penalties, while in future 5G wireless communication systems, the latency should be reduced as far as possible. To this end, a novel LDPC parallelization approach for LDPC decoding on a multi-core processor device is proposed in this article. It reduces the processing latency down to some microseconds as highlighted by x86 multi-core experimentations.