Motivated by recently derived fundamental limits on total (transmit + decoding) power for coded communication, this paper investigates how close regular LDPC codes can get to these fundamental limits. For two decoding algorithms (Gallager-A and Gallager-B), we provide upper and lower bounds on the required decoding power based on models of parallelized decoding implementations. As the target error-probability is lowered to zero, we show that the transmit power must increase unboundedly in order to minimize total (transmit + decoding) power. Complementing our theoretical results, we develop detailed physical models of decoding implementations using rigorous (post-layout) circuit simulations, and use them to provide a framework to search for codes that may minimize total power. Our results show that approaching the total-power channel capacity requires increasing the complexity of both the code design and the corresponding decoding algorithm as the communication distance is increased, or as the target error-probability is lowered.
['Karthik Ganesan', 'Pulkit Grover', 'Jan M. Rabaey', 'Andrea J. Goldsmith']
Towards Approaching Total-Power-Capacity: Transmit and Decoding Power Minimization for LDPC Codes