Construction of Full-Diversity LDPC Lattices for Block-Fading Channels

Abstract: LDPC lattices were the first family of lattices which have an efficient decoding algorithm in high dimensions over an AWGN channel. Considering Construction D' of lattices with one binary LDPC code as underlying code gives the well known Construction A LDPC lattices or 1-level LDPC lattices. Block-fading channel (BF) is a useful model for various wireless communication channels in both indoor and outdoor environments. Frequency-hopping schemes and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can conveniently be modelled as block-fading channels. Applying lattices in this type of channel entails dividing a lattice point into multiple blocks such that fading is constant within a block but changes, independently, across blocks. The design of lattices for BF channels offers a challenging problem, which differs greatly from its counterparts like AWGN channels. Recently, the original binary Construction A for lattices, due to Forney, have been generalized to a lattice construction from totally real and complex multiplication fields. This generalized Construction A of lattices provides signal space diversity intrinsically, which is the main requirement for the signal sets designed for fading channels. In this paper we construct full diversity LDPC lattices for block-fading channels using Construction A over totally real number fields. We propose a new iterative decoding method for these family of lattices which has complexity that grows linearly in the dimension of the lattice. In order to implement our decoding algorithm, we propose the definition of a parity check matrix and Tanner graph for full diversity Construction A lattices. We also prove that the constructed LDPC lattices together with the proposed decoding method admit diversity order n-1 over an n-block-fading channel.