An Efficient Two-Stage Decoding Scheme for LDPC-CRC Concatenated Codes

In modern communication systems, the concatenation of a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code with a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) code is commonly used for error correction. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity two-stage scheme for decoding these codes using their concatenation structures. In the first stage, the traditional belief propagation (BP)-based iterative algorithm with a relative small maximum number of iterations is performed for decoding the LDPC code. If an LDPC codeword is obtained in this stage, the decoding process terminates. Otherwise, the second stage of the decoding process is performed, in which the guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND) algorithm is applied to the CRC code. A list of information sequences satisfying the CRC check is obtained, each of which is then encoded to an LDPC codeword. The most likely codeword among them is the output of the decoding approach. The simulation results indicate that the proposed two-stage decoding approach can outperform the traditional BP-based iterative algorithm with a large maximum number of iterations. Moreover, the average complexity of the proposed approach is relatively low.