Estimating BP Decoding Performance of Moderate-Length Irregular LDPC Codes with Sphere Bounds

This paper estimates belief-propagation (BP) decoding performance of moderate-length irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with sphere bounds. We note that for moderate-length($10^3{\leq}N{\leq}4\times10^3$) irregular LDPC codes, BP decoding performance, which is much worse than maximum likelihood (ML) decoding performance, is well matched with one of loose upper bounds, i.e., sphere bounds. We introduce the sphere bounding technique for particular codes, not average bounds. The sphere bounding estimation technique is validated by simulation results. It is also shown that sphere bounds and BP decoding performance of irregular LDPC codes are very close at bit-error-rates (BERs) $P_b$ of practical importance($10^{-5}{\leq}P_b{\leq}10^{-4}$).