Hardware-Based Linear Program Decoding With the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

We present a hardware-based implementation of linear program (LP) decoding for binary linear codes. LP decoding frames error-correction as an optimization problem. In contrast, variants of belief propagation (BP) decoding frame error-correction as a problem of graphical inference. LP decoding has several advantages over BP-based methods, including convergence guarantees and better error-rate performance in high-reliability channels. The latter makes LP decoding attractive for optical transport and storage applications. However, LP decoding, when implemented with general solvers, does not scale to large blocklengths and is not suitable for a parallelized implementation in hardware. It has been recently shown that the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) can be applied to decompose the LP decoding problem. The result is a message-passing algorithm with a structure very similar to BP. We present modifications to this algorithm, resulting in a more intuitive and hardware-compatible form. This is particularly true for projection onto the parity polytope: the major computational primitive for ADMM-LP decoding. Furthermore, we present results for a fixed-point Verilog implementation of ADMM-LP decoding. This implementation targets a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform to evaluate error-rate performance and estimate resource usage. We show that frame error rate performance well within 0.5 dB of double-precision implementations is possible with 10-bit messages. Finally, we outline research opportunities that should be explored en route to an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation that is capable of Gigabit-per-second throughput.