Optimization of Bit Mapping and Quantized Decoding for Off-the-Shelf Protograph LDPC Codes with Application to IEEE 802.3ca

Protograph-based, off-the-shelf low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are optimized for higher-order modulation and quantized sum-product decoders. As an example, for the recently proposed LDPC code from the upcoming IEEE 802.3ca standard for passive optical networks (PONs), an optimized mapping of the bit channels originating from bit-metric decoding to the protograph variable nodes gains 0.4 dB and 0.3 dB at a bit-error rate of 1e-6 for shaped and uniform signaling, respectively. Furthermore, the clipping value for a quantized sum-product LDPC decoder is optimized via discretized density evolution.