Row-Boosted Ensemble Belief Propagation for Short LDPC Codes

Belief-propagation (BP) decoding of short and moderate-length low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is limited by finite-length graph effects: a single decoder trajectory can become trapped or oscillatory even when an alternative trajectory would decode the received word. Existing ensemble-BP decoders create the required diversity through multiple parity-check matrices, automorphisms, modified schedules, subcodes, or altered update rules. We introduce row-boosted ensemble (RBE) decoding as a minimal decoder-side diversity mechanism: all ensemble members share the same parity-check matrix and the same BP kernel, and differ only in a small set of parity-check rows whose outgoing messages are boosted. On the 5G~NR BG1 \((144,96)\) code, RBE with \(32\) members lowers the frame-error rate of BP with \(20\) iterations (BP-20) from \(1.6\times10^{-2}\) to \(1.6\times10^{-3}\) at \(E_\mathrm{b}/N_0=4.0\,\mathrm{dB}\), outperforming saturated-min-sum and affine subcode ensembles of equal size. Increasing the ensemble size yields additional gains, indicating that RBE provides a scalable performance-complexity tradeoff. The gains transfer across 5G~NR block lengths and rates, to non-5G short LDPC codes, and across flooding and layered schedules.