Low-complexity early termination method for rateless soft decoder

We propose a new early termination method (ETM) with low computational complexity for Luby transform belief propagation (BP) decoder. The proposed method, which we call least reliable messages (LRM) ETM, observes only sign alterations of a small cluster in log-likelihood ratio messages passing between nodes in BP decoder. Simulation results and complexity analyzes show that LRM ETM has quite low computational complexity and small average iteration amounts without any performance degradation compared with conventional ETMs in literature. The method can be applied to code families which can be decoded by BP such as low density parity check codes, polar codes, and Raptor codes.