Power Consumption of LDPC Decoders in Software Radio

LDPC code is a powerful error correcting code and has been applied to many advanced communication systems. The prosperity of software radio has motivated us to investigate the implementation of LDPC decoders on processors. In this paper, we estimate and compare complexity and power consumption of LDPC decoding algorithms running on general purpose processors. Using the estimation results, we show two power control schemes for software radio: SNR-based algorithm diversity and joint transmit power and receiver energy management. Overall, this paper discusses general concerns about using processors as the software radio platform for the implementation of LDPC decoders.