Irregularly Clipped Sparse Regression Codes

Recently, it was found that clipping can significantly improve the section error rate (SER) performance of sparse regression (SR) codes if an optimal clipping threshold is chosen. In this paper, we propose irregularly clipped SR codes, where multiple clipping thresholds are applied to symbols according to a distribution, to further improve the SER performance of SR codes. Orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) algorithm is used for decoding. Using state evolution, the distribution of irregular clipping thresholds is optimized to minimize the SER of OAMP decoding. As a result, optimized irregularly clipped SR codes achieve a better tradeoff between clipping distortion and noise distortion than regularly clipped SR codes. Numerical results demonstrate that irregularly clipped SR codes achieve 0.4 dB gain in signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) over regularly clipped SR codes at code length$\,\approx2.5\!\times\! 10^4$ and SER$\,\approx10^{-5}$. We further show that irregularly clipped SR codes are robust over a wide range of code rates.