LLDPC

Abstract

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been widely used for Forward Error Correction (FEC) in wireless networks because they can approach the capacity of wireless links with lightweight encoding complexity. Although LoRa networks have been developed for many applications, they still adopt simple FEC codes, i.e., Hamming codes, which provide limited FEC capacity, causing unreliable data transmissions and high energy consumption of LoRa nodes. To close this gap, this paper develops LLDPC, which realizes LDPC coding in LoRa networks. Three challenges are addressed. 1) LoRa employs Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) modulation, which only provides hard demodulation results without soft information. However, LDPC requires the Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) of each received bit for decoding. We develop an LLR extractor for LoRa CSS. 2) Some erroneous bits may have high LLRs (i.e., wrongly confident in their correctness), significantly affecting the LDPC decoding efficiency. We use symbol-level information to fine-tune the LLRs of some bits to improve the LDPC decoding efficiency. 3) Soft Belief Propagation (SBP) is typically used as the LDPC decoding algorithm. It involves heavy iterative computation, resulting in a long decoding latency, which prevents the gateway from sending timely an acknowledgment. We take advantage of recent advances in graph neural networks for fast belief propagation in LDPC decoding. Extensive simulations on a large-scale synthetic dataset and in-filed experiments reveal that LLDPC can extend the lifetime of the default LoRa by 86.7% and reduce the decoding latency of the SBP algorithm by 58.09×.