C HINA C OMMUNICATIONS
5G LDPC Coded Modulation with Hybrid Shaping
Jiayi Yang1 , Qianfan Wang1 , Congduan Li2,* , Xiao Ma*1
1
School of Computer Science and Engineering, and Guangdong Key Laboratory of Information Security Technology, Sun Yat-sen
University, Guangzhou 510006, China
2
School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China
*
The corresponding author, email: licongd@mail.sysu.edu.cn, maxiao@mail.sysu.edu.cn
Abstract: In this paper, we integrate the 5G low-
density parity-check (LDPC) coded modulation
systems with hybrid shaping, where the centroid-
based geometric shaping is implemented to remedy
the performance loss of the many-to-one probabilistic
shaping. Taking into account the fact that the 5G
parity-check matrices have an uneven density in differ-
ent parts, we elaborately design a simple row-column
interleaver for the bit-interleaved coded modulation
with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) system to allocate
the ambiguous bits caused by the many-to-one map-
ping to the sparser parity part, resulting in the hybrid
shaping for BICM-ID (HS-BICM-ID) system. For
the multi-layer coding (MLC) system, we propose a
cyclic shift mapping scheme to allocate evenly the
ambiguous bits to each layer, resulting in the hybrid
shaping for MLC (HS-MLC) system. By treating the
multiple binary codes of the HS-MLC system as a
non-binary LDPC code, we present a joint decoding
algorithm, which does not require iterative processing
between demapping and decoding. Numerical results
show that: 1) the HS-BICM-ID can obtain shaping
gains of about 0.2 dB and 1.0 dB compared to the
constant composition distribution matching (CCDM)
shaping and the geometric shaping, respectively, while
it can obtain a shaping gain of about 1.2 dB compared
to the scheme with uniform input; 2) for the HS-MLC,
the performance of the nonbinary joint decoding
algorithm (without iterative demapping) is slightly
better than the iterative MSD algorithm (with iterative
Received: Nov. 21, 2023
Revised: Mar. 05, 2024
Editor: Tao Jiang
China Communications
demapping); 3) the HS-MLC has a significantly
better performance compared to the time-division
HS-BICM-ID over fast fading channels.
Keywords: Bit-interleaved coded modula-
tion (BICM); coded modulation; geometric shaping;
multilevel coding (MLC); probabilistic shaping
I. INTRODUCTION
With the increasing need of faster and more reli-
able data transmissions, efficient coded modulation
schemes have drawn significant interest. The concept
of combining coding and modulation was first intro-
duced by Massey in 1974 [1]. Since then, numerous
coded modulation schemes have been proposed, in-
cluding multilevel coding (MLC) [2], bit-interleaved
coded modulation (BICM) [3] and trellis coded modu-
lation (TCM) [4]. It has been demonstrated in [5] that
MLC with multistage decoding (MSD) approaches
the constellation constrained channel capacity if the
component code rates are properly chosen. How-
ever, the MLC system requires the joint design of
multiple codes. Different from the MLC system, the
BICM system adopts a single code [6] and can be
decoded iteratively, known as the BICM with itera-
tive decoding (BICM-ID) [7] system. In fading chan-
nels, BICM is favored over TCM as its simplicity
and flexibility [8]. As an emerging technology, the
delayed BICM (DBICM) [9] [10] is also capable of
achieving constellation constrained capacity by uti-
lizing the interdependency among signals at different
time slots [11], while only requiring a single channel
code.
The channel inputs of the aforementioned coded
1
modulation schemes are usually uniformly distributed
and regularly equidistant, leading to an asymptotic
loss of about 1.53 dB, referred to as the shaping
gain [12]. Constellation shaping is a commonly used
technique to optimize the distribution of the channel
input, which aims to achieve the shaping gain. This
technique can be broadly classified into two types:
probabilistic shaping [13–16] and geometric shap-
ing [17–20].
The basic idea of probabilistic shaping is to em-
ploy a non-uniform distribution on equidistant signal
points. This can be achieved by many-to-one map-
ping [21], named as Gallager mapping in [13], which
can be implemented by superposition or by table-look-
up, resulting in the dyadic probability distribution.
When dyadic shaping is combined with the binary for-
ward error correction (FEC), the receiver typically em-
ploys an iterative demapping scheme to reverse the im-
pact of the many-to-one mapping, say, [22]. The prob-
abilistic amplitude shaping (PAS) with constant com-
position distribution matching (CCDM) was proposed
in [23], which can efficiently approximate the optimal
distribution. However, the complexity of the shaping
code for CCDM is a challenge in cost-sensitive trans-
missions.
The basic idea of geometric shaping is to employ a
uniform distribution on non-equidistant constellation
points. In [17], it is shown that Gaussian-like signal
sets achieve the capacity of additive white gaussian
noise (AWGN) channel if the order of constellation
sets goes to infinity. Recently, an optimized geomet-
ric shaping scheme was implemented to the quadrature
amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation in [24].
Compared to probabilistic shaping, geometric shaping
usually has lower complexity for coded modulation
systems, but the shaping gain is limited by the order
of constellation sets.
Typically, the existing work separately adopts either
the probabilistic or geometric shaping design, while
we consider a joint optimization design of the con-
stellation set and the probability distribution. Taking
into account the pros and cons of probabilistic shap-
ing and geometric shaping, we present in this paper
a hybrid shaping scheme by using centroid-based geo-
metric shaping to compensate for the performance loss
of dyadic probabilistic shaping. Furthermore, the hy-
brid shaping is tailored to the 5G low-density parity-
check (LDPC) code and is applied to BICM-ID and
2 China Communications
MLC coded modulation systems. The main contribu-
tions of this paper are listed as follows.
• We present a hybrid shaping scheme for pulse am-
plitude modulation (PAM) constellations, where
the centroid-based geometric shaping is imple-
mented to remedy the performance loss of the
dyadic many-to-one probabilistic shaping. Distin-
guished from the shaping scheme in [23], the pre-
sented hybrid shaping can avoid the complicated
implementation of the distribution matcher, and
the main complexity of our scheme lies in the con-
stant complexity introduced during the demap-
ping. Numerical results show that, in terms of
capacity gain, the presented hybrid shaping out-
performs the conventional probabilistic and geo-
metric shaping schemes.
• Taking into account the fact that the 5G parity-
check matrices have an uneven density in differ-
ent parts, we elaborately design a simple row-
column interleaver for the BICM-ID system to al-
locate the ambiguous bits caused by the many-to-
one mapping to the sparser parity part, resulting in
the hybrid shaping for BICM-ID (HS-BICM-ID)
system. Simulation results demonstrate that the
HS-BICM-ID can achieve shaping gains of ap-
proximately 0.2 dB and 1.0 dB when compared
to the CCDM shaping and the geometric shaping,
respectively. It can obtain a shaping gain of about
1.2 dB when compared to the scheme with uni-
form input.
• The hybrid shaping scheme is applied to the
MLC system, resulting in the hybrid shaping for
MLC (HS-MLC) system, where a cyclic shift
mapping is proposed to allocate the ambiguous
bits evenly to each layer. By treating the mul-
tiple binary codes of the MLC system as a non-
binary LDPC code, we present a joint decoding
algorithm, which does not require iterative pro-
cessing between demapping and decoding. Sim-
ulation results show that the performance of the
nonbinary joint decoding algorithm (without iter-
ative demapping) is slightly better than the iter-
ative MSD decoding (with unavoidable iterative
demapping).
• We compare the performance of time-division
HS-BICM-ID and HS-MLC over Rayleigh fading
channels. Due to the adoption of multi-layer joint
 modulation, the HS-MLC scheme is more suit- where
able for fading channels compared to the time-
division HS-BICM-ID. Simulation results show 1 (y − x)2
pY |X (y|x) = √ exp(− ) (3)
that the HS-MLC system has a significantly better 2πσ 2σ 2
performance compared to the time-division HS-
BICM-ID over fast fading channels. is the channel transition probability density func-
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In tion (PDF) and
Section II, we review the probabilistic shaping with
X
many-to-one mapping and the geometric shaping. The pY (y) = PX (x)pY |X (y|x) (4)
hybrid shaping scheme is also presented in this sec- x∈A
tion. In Section III, we present the HS-BICM-ID and
HS-MLC systems. Simulation results are presented in with the input distribution PX (x).
Section IV. Section V concludes this paper.

2.2 Probabilistic Shaping

II. HYBRID SHAPING WITH MANY-TO-
ONE MAPPING
2.1 AWGN Channel Model
Consider the transmission over the AWGN channel
Yt = Xt + Zt , where Xt ∈ R and Yt ∈ R are the
channel input and output at time t, respectively. The
sequence Z = (Z1 , · · · , Zt , · · · ) is assumed to be
an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) ad-
ditive noise sequence, where Zt is a Gaussian ran-
dom variable with mean 0 and variance σ 2 , denoted
by Zt ∼ N (0, σ 2 ). The channel input is subject to
the power constraint, i,e., E(Xt2 ) ≤ Es , where E(.)
denotes the expectation. We know that the channel
capacity equals the maximum mutual information and
Xt ∼ N (0, Es ) is the optimal distribution. The capac-
ity in bits per channel use (bits/channel use) is a func-
tion of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and is given by
Shannon in [25]
1 constellation point. A signal mapping is defined by
C= log2 (1 + SNR), (1)
2 ϕ(v) = x, where v = (v (0) , · · · , v (m−1) ) ∈ Fm 2 and
where SNR = Es /σ 2 .
In practice, the distribution of channel input Xt
is usually discrete, which is constrained by the con-
stellation set A of finite cardinality. In this pa-
To achieve the shaping gain with probabilistic shaping,
we need to assign an optimized probability distribution
over a given signal constellation. It has been proved
that the Maxwell-Boltzmann (M-B) distribution [26]
is nearly optimal, which can be expressed by
2
e−βx
PX (x) = P −βx′2
, x ∈ A, (5)
x′ ∈A e
where β is a non-negative scaling factor. For β = 0,
the distribution is uniform, while for β > 0, the distri-
bution is Gaussian-like. By selecting β properly, the
minimum average power can be achieved for a given
mutual information.
In this paper, the dyadic distribution is used to quan-
tize the M-B distribution. By using the many-to-one
mapping, multiple labels may be mapped to the same
signal point, resulting in a non-uniform distribution of
channel input. Let m denote the number of bits per
x ∈ A. The dyadic distribution for constellation set A
is
X δ(ϕ(v) = x)
PX′ (x) = , x ∈ A, (6)
2m
v∈F2 m

per, we only consider one-dimensional signaling for

the AWGN channel, where we assume that A = where the indication function δ(P) = 1 if the propo-
{aj ∈ R, 0 ≤ j ≤ M − 1}. Then the mutual informa- sition P is true and δ(P) = 0 otherwise. From (6),
tion can be written as it is not difficult to see that the probabilities of the
channel input are integer multiples of 2−m . To obtain
pY |X (Y |X) the sub-optimal quantized distribution PX∗ of given m,
I(X; Y ) = E(log2 ), (2) the criterion of minimum Kullback-Leibler (KL) dis-
pY (Y )

China Communications 3
tance [27] is used, which can be expressed by 2.4 Hybrid Shaping
The centroid-based geometric shaping is easy to op-
PX∗ = arg min D(PX′ ||PX ). (7) erate without increasing the complexity, but the gain
′
PX
is limited when M is small. The dyadic probabilis-
tic shaping with many-to-one mapping is also easy to
Example 1.: Consider a transmission of 16-PAM implement without a complicated design of the shap-
constellation with 3 bits/channel use. The constel- ing code, but there is a performance loss between the
lation set A consists of the one-dimensional signals achievable capacity with the nearly optimal distribu-
{−15, −13, · · · , −1, 1, · · · , 13, 15}. From (5), the tion.
nearly optimal distribution PX of 3 bits/channel use To remedy the loss from the capacity of nearly opti-
can be obtained. Then, we use the criterion of mini- mal distribution, a hybrid shaping scheme is presented.
mum KL distance to obtain the sub-optimal distribu- Different from the typical shaping schemes, the pre-
tion for given m. For m = 5, the sub-optimal distribu- sented hybrid shaping can be viewed as a joint opti-
tion PX∗ of the constellation set can be obtained, where mization of the constellation probability and the con-
the probabilities
 −3of −3
the positive constellation points stellation set. Due to the limited approximation ef-
are PX = 2 , 2 , 2−4 , 2−4 , 2−5 , 2−5 , 2−5 , 2−5 ,
half
fectiveness of dyadic many-to-one probabilistic shap-
while the negative constellation points have symmet- ing for the target distributiomn, we integrate it with a
ric probabilities. The KL distance between the sub- universal centroid-based geometric shaping algorithm.
optimal distribution and nearly optimal distribution This allows us to adjust the positions of constellation
is 0.0616 for m = 5. For m = 6, the sub- points based on the dyadic distribution, further ap-
optimal distribution
 −3 −3of positive constellation points proximating a Gaussian distribution input and achiev-
half −4 −4 −4 −5 −6 −6
are PX = 2 , 2 , 2 , 2 , 2 , 2 , 2 , 2 , ing better performance.
where the KL distance from the optimal distribution is • Optimization for the input distribution by us-
0.0282. ing the dyadic probabilistic shaping with many-
to-one mapping: The process can be viewed
as an optimization of probability for equidistant
2.3 Geometric Shaping constellations. Firstly, for given spectral effi-
ciency, the nearly optimal distribution PX can
It has been shown that the channel capacity can also be be obtained under the equidistant constellations
approached by equiprobable signaling with Gaussian- from (5). Secondly, based on the idea of dyadic
like signal sets [17]. Specifically, we divide the stan- many-to-one mapping, the criterion of minimum
dard Gaussian PDF, N (0, 1), into M disjoint regions KL distance in (7) can be used to approach the
such that nearly optimal distribution for given m, thus ob-
taining the sub-optimal distribution PX∗ .
ξk+1
−x2
Z
1 1 • Optimization for the constellation set by using the
√ exp( )dx = , k = 0, 1, · · · , M −1,
ξk 2π 2 M geometric shaping: The process can be viewed as
(8) an optimization of the constellation set for a given
where the k-th interval is given by (ξk , ξk+1 ) with ξ0 = sub-optimal distribution of equidistant constella-
−∞ and ξM = ∞. The centroid of each interval can tions. We consider using a centroid-based geo-
be calculated by metric shaping scheme [17] to optimize the signal
set A under the sub-optimal distribution. Firstly,
Z ξk+1
M −x2 the standard Gaussian PDF is divided into M in-
xk = √ xe 2 dx, k = 0, 1, · · · , M − 1.
2π ξk tervals by choosing the boundaries ξk such that
(9)
ξk+1
Then, we select a scaling factor α > 0 such that the −x2
Z
1
√ exp( )dx = PX∗ (xk ), k = 0, 1, · · · , M −1,
constellation set A = {aj = αxj , 0 ≤ j ≤ M − 1} ξk 2π 2
has an average power E(X 2 ) = Es . (10)

4 China Communications
 where PX∗ (xk ) denotes the sub-optimal distribu- 5
3
tion probability of the k-th signal point obtained 4.5
2.98

from (6) and (7) for a given m. Then the signal set

Mutual Information (bits/channel use)

4 2.96

A′ of hybrid shaping can be obtained by scaling

2.94
3.5 2.92

the centroids, 3
2.9

2.88

2.5 2.86
17.8 18 18.2 18.4
Z ξk+1
1 −x2
x′k = √
2
xe 2 dx, k = 0, 1, · · · , M −1,
2πPX∗ (xk ) ξk 1.5
(11) 1
such that E(X 2 ) = Es .
0.5

Given the dyadic distribution and the optimized con- 0

0 5 10 15 20 25 30
stellation set, we may use a binary Huffman tree to SNR(dB)
define a bit-to-symbol Gray mapping [28]. This is il-
Figure 1. Mutual information versus SNR curves for differ-
lustrated by the following example.
ent shaping schemes.
Example 2.: Given m = 6, Es = 1. Firstly,
the probability of constellation is optimized by using
2.5 Numerical Analysis
dyadic probabilistic shaping with many-to-one map-
ping, resulting in the sub-optimal distribution PX∗ . The mutual information I(X; Y ) defined in (2) can be
Then, the constellation set is optimized by using the evaluated by the Monte Carlo method or other numer-
geometric shaping, resulting in the signal set A′ . Fur- ical integration methods. In Fig. 1, we plot the mutual
ther, we can get the signal mapping ϕ from a binary information of the presented hybrid shaping, the geo-
Huffman tree, as shown in Table 1, where the sym- metric shaping, the probabilistic shaping with many-
bol [×] is used for the so-called ambiguous bit mean- to-one mapping and the uniform for 16-PAM. The nu-
ing that its value can be either 0 or 1. For exam- merical results are tabulated in Table 2 at SNR = 18
ple, the signal point a1 = −2.01 has one label with dB. It can be seen that hybrid shaping with m = 6 is
ϕ(000001) = −2.01, and a2 = −1.69 has two labels nearly optimal in the low and moderate SNR regions,
with ϕ(000010) = ϕ(000011) = −1.69. outperforming both probabilistic shaping with many-
to-one mapping and geometric shaping, and achieving
a better capacity gain. We also present the signal posi-
Table 1. Mapping Scheme for 16-PAM Hybrid Shaping m = 6
tions and the probability distributions of the schemes
x = ϕ(v) v (0) v (1) v (2) v (3) v (4) v (5) mentioned above for 16-PAM in Fig. 2. Obviously,
-2.52 0 0 0 0 0 0 the proposed hybrid shaping scheme provides a better
-2.01 0 0 0 0 0 1 approximation to the Gaussian-like channel inputs.
-1.69 0 0 0 0 1 ×
-1.33 0 0 0 1 × ×
-1.02 0 0 1 1 × × III. LDPC CODED MODULATION
-0.78 0 0 1 0 × ×
-0.49 0 1 1 × × × 3.1 Review of 5G LDPC Codes
-0.16 0 1 0 × × ×
+0.16 1 1 0 × × × The 5G LDPC codes are a class of rate-compatible
+0.49 1 1 1 × × × quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes with raptor-like con-
-0.78 1 0 1 0 × × struction. Two base matrices, known as base graphs
-1.02 1 0 1 1 × × BG1 and BG2, have been specifically designed for
-1.33 1 0 0 1 × × different ranges of block lengths and code rates [29],
+1.69 1 0 0 0 1 ×
from which the parity-check matrices can be con-
+2.01 1 0 0 0 0 1
structed by the lifting operator with a factor Z. The
+2.52 1 0 0 0 0 0
structure diagram of the parity-check matrix is illus-
trated in Fig. 3, where the sub-matrices A and E con-

China Communications 5
 Table 2. Information-Theoretic Analysis of Different Shaping Schemes SNR = 18 dB

Shaping Scheme m Geometric/Probabilistic Properties I(X; Y )

M-B Distribution 4 equidistant, non-equiprobable 2.99
Hybrid Shaping 6 non-equidistant, non-equiprobable 2.97
Many-to-One Mapping 6 equidistant, non-equiprobable 2.95
Geometric Shaping 4 non-equidistant, equiprobable 2.88
Uniform 4 equidistant, equiprobable 2.82

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Figure 2. Four different constellations for 16-PAM when Es = 1. (a) Uniform for equidistant 16-PAM. (b) Geometric
shaping for equiprobable 16-PAM. (c) Dyadic probabilistic shaping for equidistant 16-PAM. (d) Hybrid shaping for 16-
PAM.

sist of circulant permutation matrices and zero matri-

ces, the sub-matrix I is an identity matrix, O is a zero A D
A O
matrix and D is a dual-diagonal matrix. A codeword
can be partitioned into two parts, where the left part
corresponding to [A, D] is referred to as the kernel
part and the remaining right part is referred to as the E I
extension parity part.

3.2 HS-BICM-ID System With 5G LDPC Punctured information bits

Codes
The HS-BICM-ID system is depicted in Fig. 4. At
the transmitter, the input sequence of information bits
u ∈ Fk2 is firstly encoded by the LDPC encoder into a
codeword c ∈ Fn2 , and the codeword c is interleaved
by π to obtain ce. Then, the interleaved codeword ce is
Figure 3. A diagram of the parity-check matrix for 5G
LDPC codes, where the sub-matrices A and E consist of
circulant permutation matrices and zero matrices, the sub-
matrix I is an identity matrix, O is a zero matrix and D is a
dual-diagonal matrix. The part [A, D] is referred to as the
kernel part and corresponds to a high rate codeword.

6 China Communications
 u c c x
5G LDPC
encoder π HS Mapper
û LA,Dec LE ,Dem
π 1
5G LDPC
HS Demapper
decoder
LE ,Dec LA,Dem
π coded bits. To be precise, we associate the ambigu-
Figure 4. The diagram of the HS-BICM-ID system, where
π is a row-column interleaver. At the receiver, an iterative
decoding/demapping is performed, which exchanges extrin-
sic messages between the demapper and the decoder.
mapped to the transmitted signal sequence x accord-
ing to the HS mapper. At the receiver, an iterative
decoding/demapping is performed, which exchanges
extrinsic messages between the demapper and the de-
coder. Formally, following [30], we denote by LA,Dem
(initialized properly) the input a priori information to
the demapper and by LE,Dem the output extrinsic in-
formation from the demapper. Similarly, LA,Dec and
LE,Dec are used for the decoder. Given a noisy sig-
nal yτ at time τ = 0, 1, · · · , n/m − 1, the extrinsic
information in terms of log-likelihood-ratio (LLR) as-
sociated with the i-th bit of c̃τ from the demmaper can
be calculated as
P
c̃τ ∈L0i p(yτ |x = ϕ(c̃τ ))p(c̃τ |LA,Dem
LE,Dem (τ, i) = ln P
c̃τ ∈L1i p(yτ |x = ϕ(c̃τ ))p(c̃τ |LA,Dem ) We can also optimize the design of the interleaver
sign of the interleaver. This issue becomes more crit-
ical for the 5G LDPC codes since their parity-check
matrices have an uneven density in different parts.
AWGN
channel
Recalling that the many-to-one mapping introduces
y ambiguous bits, which can be viewed as punctured
bits for the LDPC codes, an intuitive idea is to as-
sociate the ambiguous bits with those “unimportant”
ous bits with the extension parity part of a 5G LDPC
codeword, which involves less number of parity-check
equations and hence has less effect on performance
even punctured. This can be implemented by using
a row-column interleaver π between the encoder and
the mapper, and correspondingly, a deinterleaver π −1
between the decoder and demapper at the receiver for
HS-BICM-ID. A codeword of length n is written row
by row into an m × m n
array from top to bottom and
read out column by column from left to right. The po-
sitions in the array where ambiguous bits may occur
are marked with the symbol ×. An example of row-
column interleaver with n = 42 and m = 6 is shown
in Fig. 5, from which we see that, without interleaving,
many ambiguous bits are associated with the kernel
part (the left part), while, with interleaving, most am-
biguous bits are associated with the extension parity
part of the codeword. Also notice that, with the row-
column interleaver, one column of m bits is mapped
)to a signal point.

− LA,Dem (τ, i), by considering the degrees of the variable nodes, fol-
(12) lowing [23], as the variable and check node degrees
influence the decoding threshold of the LDPC code.
n
(i)
o In Table 3, we present the variable node degree dis-
where Lbi = c̃τ ∈ Fm 2 |c̃τ = b for i =
tributions of the rate-1/2 5G LDPC codes, which are
0, 1, · · · , m − 1. Given the LLR sequence LA,Dec , the constructed based on BG2 with lifting factors 96, 192
extrinsic information of the t-th bit of a codeword from and 384. All codes have six different variable node
the decoder can be calculated as, degrees, which decrease from left to right. A bit inter-
leaver π sort the coded bits by bit-levels, i.e.,
p(ct = 0|LA,Dec )
LE,Dec (t) = ln − LA,Dec (t), (13)
p(ct = 1|LA,Dec )
π
c0 , c1 , · · · , cn−1 −→ c̃(0) , c̃(1) , · · ·, c̃(m−1) , (14)
where t = 0, 1, · · · , n − 1.
In the presented HS-BICM-ID system, we need to
specialize the structure of the interleaver. Different where c̃(i) denotes a string of n/m bits of level i.
from conventional BICM systems, in which a uniform There are (m−1)! choices of π, from which we choose
interleaver typically performs well, the BICM system the one with the best error performance, which is the
with many-to-one mapping requires an elaborate de- row-column interleaver.

China Communications 7
 Codeword 100
kernel part extension parity part

Mapping without 10-1

interleaving
kernel part extension parity part

Row-input 10-2

FER
Column-output

Row-column interleaving 10-3


       extension parity part

10-4

Mapping with row-column

interleaving kernel part extension parity part
18.5 19 19.5 20 20.5 21 21.5 22
ambiguous bits

Figure 5. An example of row-column interleaver with Figure 6. Performance comparison of the designed row-
n = 42 and m = 6, from which we see that, without inter- column interleaver and the random interleaver for the HS-
leaving, many ambiguous bits are associated with the kernel BICM-ID system. The code is a rate-1/2 5G LDPC code of
part (the left part), while, with interleaving, most ambigu- length 1920 constructed based on BG2.
ous bits are associated with the extension parity part of the
codeword.
3.3 HS-MLC System With 5G LDPC Codes
The HS-MLC
n system is depicted
o in Fig. 7, where
(i) (i)
Table 3. Variable Node Degree Distribution of 5G LDPC codes c = ct , 0 ≤ t ≤ n − 1 denotes the codeword
of the i-th layer, ϕ is a cyclic shift mapper, and πi is
variable node degrees an interleaver at the i-th layer to be designed in the
k 7 5 4 3 2 1 following.
960 192 192 384 288 96 768 Again, due to the existence of the ambiguous bits,
1920 384 384 768 576 192 1536 we need to specialize the signal mapping ϕ. Let ψ :
3840 768 768 1536 1152 384 3072 Fm2 7→ A be a conventional signal mapper which takes
as input m bits, one from each layer, and delivers as
output a signal point for transmission, denoted by

(0) (1) (m−1)

xt = ψ(c̃t , c̃t , · · · , c̃t
), (0 ≤ t ≤ n − 1).
Example 3.(Performance Comparison of Different (15)
Interleavers): We have elaborately designed a row- A cyclic shift signal mapper ϕ is then defined by
column interleaver to place the ambiguous bits at the
extension parity part as much as possible. In this ex- (0) (1) (m−1)
xt = ϕ(c̃t , c̃t , · · · , c̃t )
ample, we compare the performance of the designed (16)
((t+0) mod m) ((t+m−1) mod m)
row-column interleaver and the random interleaver for = ψ(c̃t , · · · , c̃t ).
HS-BICM-ID. The code is a rate-1/2 5G LDPC code
of length 1920 which is constructed based on BG2 Evidently, the signal mapper ϕ is time-varying in the
with a lifting factor Z = 96. The average number sense that the input at time t to the signal mapper ψ is
((t+0) mod m) ((t+1) mod m) ((t+m−1) mod m)
of ambiguous bits is about 740 for the hybrid shap- (c̃t , c̃t , · · · , c̃t ),
(0) (1) (m−1)
ing scheme. Simulation results are shown in Fig. 6, i.e., a cyclic shift of (c̃t , c̃t , · · · , c̃t ), implying
where it can be seen that the adopted row-column in- that all layers are treated equally. In this way, the
terleaver (allocating about 645 ambiguous bits to the power or rate allocation strategy [31] can be avoided
extension parity part) can achieve a better performance and the same LDPC code can be applied to all layers,
compared to the random interleaver (allocating about suggesting a simple design. It is not difficult to
295 ambiguous bits to the extension parity part). imagine that, even with a unified labeling strategy

8 China Communications
 u(0) 5G LDPC Encoder
c (0) π0 c (0)

u (1) c (1) π1 c (1)

5G LDPC Encoder
u Cyclic shift x
Demux mapping

u( m 1) c ( m 1) π c
( m 1)

5G LDPC Encoder m 1

Figure 7. The diagram of the HS-MLC system, where Demux denotes a demultiplexer that divides the input information bits
into m parts, πi denotes the elaborately designed interleaver of the i-th layer, ϕ denotes the cyclic shift mapper which is
used for allocating the ambiguous bits evenly to each layer.

from [32], if there is no cyclic shift mapping, all t  0,1, ,6

ambiguous bits will be allocated to the lower layers,

   c (0)
resulting in an unacceptable performance.
With the cyclic shift mapping, the coordinates at
   c (1)

m  0,1,
each layer are distinguished as two parts, one of which    c (2)

is with ambiguous bits. Then the i-th interleaver πi is ,5     c (3)

designed to arrange as many as possible extension par-     c (4)

ities in reverse order to the positions with the ambigu-
ous bits. See the following example for illustrations.
Example 4.(Design of the interleavers for HS-
MLC): In this example, we provide the design method
of the interleaver πi for HS-MLC, where m = 6,
n = 7 and three ambiguous bits might appear in each
mapping. We use a 6 × 7 array as shown in Fig. 8
to illustrate the design approach. The i-th row of the
array corresponds to the codeword sequence c̃(i) , and
each column is mapped to a signal point. The i-th in-
terleaver πi is designed to arrange the extension par-
ity part in reverse order to the positions marked by the
symbol × as many as possible while arranging the ker-
nel part in positive order for the remaining positions.
For example, the interleaver for the 0-th layer can be
expressed by π0 = (0, 1, 2, 6, 5, 4, 3).
Example 5.(Performance of the Cyclic Shift Map-
ping): The performance of the cyclic shift mapping
and the conventional signal mapping for HS-MLC are
shown in Fig. 9, where the code of each layer is a rate-
1/2 5G LDPC code of length 1920 constructed based
on BG2. At the receiver, an iterative MSD algorithm is
adopted. For the conventional signal mapping accord-
ing to (14), due to the fact that all the ambiguous bits
are allocated to Layer-3, Layer-4 and Layer-5, they
have high error rates. For the presented cyclic shift
mapping, the ambiguous bits are evenly distributed to
different layers, definitely improving the performance,
    c (5)
Figure 8. A 6 × 7 array is used to illustrate the design of the
interleaver for each layer in HS-MLC. The i-th row of the
array corresponds to the codeword sequence c̃(i) , and each
column is mapped to a signal point. The i-th interleaver πi
is designed to arrange the extension parity part in reverse
order to the positions marked by the symbol × as many as
possible while arranging the kernel part in positive order
for the remaining positions. For example, the interleaver for
the 0-th layer can be expressed by π0 = (0, 1, 2, 6, 5, 4, 3).
as confirmed in Fig. 9.
In the above example, we have implemented the it-
erative MSD algorithm for the HS-MLC system, as
illustrated in Fig. 10 (a), where the soft-input-soft-
output (SISO) decoders and SISO demapper exchange
soft messages iteratively and the decoders are executed
sequentially layer-by-layer. We can also decode the
m layers in parallel by a nonbinary LDPC decoding
algorithm, which does not require iterations between
the decoders and the demapper. To do so, we need to
treat the MLC system as a nonbinary LDPC code, as
presented in [33]. This is feasible since all the compo-
nent codes of the HS-MLC system are  with the same 
(i) (i) (i)
parity-check matrix H. Let c = c0 , · · · , cn−1

China Communications 9
 100 IV. PERFORMANCE COMPARISONS

10-1
In this section, the 5G LDPC codes with sum-product
algorithm (SPA) decoding are adopted in all simula-
tions. Unless otherwise stated, the signal constellation
10-2
for hybrid shaping is 16-PAM.
BER

10-3
4.1 Performance of HS-BICM-ID
10-4 For the HS-BICM-ID system, the information length
is set as k = 960 and the order of the dyadic mapping
is set as m = 5 or 6. To achieve the same spectral effi-
18.5 19 19.5 20 20.5 21
ciency SE = 3 bits/channel use, we employ 5G LDPC
codes with different code rates for different schemes.
Figure 9. Performance of the designed cyclic shift mapping For the uniform input scheme, a rate-3/4 5G LDPC
according to (16) and the conventional signal mapping ac- code of length 1301 is adopted. For the CCDM shap-
cording to (15) for the HS-MLC system. The code of each
ing scheme, a rate-5/6 5G LDPC code (without in-
layer is a rate-1/2 5G LDPC code of length 1920.
formation bits puncture) of length 1152 is used. For
the presented hybrid shaping scheme, a rate-1/2 and
a rate-3/5 5G LDPC code are employed for 6-bit and
be a codeword at the i-th layer. Define 5-bit hybrid shaping, respectively. The SPA with max-
imum local iteration number Imax = 50 is performed
c(0)
 
at the LDPC decoder and the maximum global itera-
C =  ...  tion (between the LDPC decoder and the demapper)
 
number Tmax = 10. The simulation results are shown
c(m−1)
 (0) in Fig. 11, from which we observe that
(0) (0) 
c0 c1 · · · cn−1 (17) • the proposed hybrid shaping can obtain a shaping
=  ... .. .. ..  gain of about 0.85 dB compared to the scheme

. . . 
(m−1)
c0
(m−1)
c1
(m−1)
· · · cn−1 with uniform input;

= (c0 , c1 , · · · , cn−1 ), • the proposed hybrid shaping can obtain an ex-

(0) (m−1)
where ct = (ct , · · · , ct )T can be viewed as
m
an element from F2 . It is not difficult to see that
HCT = H(c0 , · · · , cn−1 )T = 0 and hence C can be
viewed as a codeword from a nonbinary LDPC code
specified by the parity-check matrix H. Therefore,
the HS-MLC system can be decoded by the nonbinary
LDPC decoding algorithm, as illustrated in Fig. 10 (b).
Remark: In terms of computational complexity, the
complexity of nonbinary joint decoding is higher than
that of MSD decoding. As for the time complexity,
MSD decoding is serial, leading to higher decoding la-
tency, while joint decoding is parallel, allowing for si-
multaneous decoding of multiple layers. Furthermore,
for the joint decoding, the iterations between the de-
coders and the demapper can be avoided, effectively
reducing the consumption of hardware resources.
tra gain of about 0.2 dB compared to the CCDM
shaping;
• the proposed hybrid shaping with m = 6 bits has
a better performance in comparison to that with
m = 5 bits.
Example 6.(Performance Comparison with latest
Schemes): We compare the performance of hybrid
shaping with the latest proposed probabilistic shap-
ing scheme in [34] and the geometric shaping scheme
in [35], respectively. The spectral efficiency is kept as
SE = 2.63 bits/channel use, and the length of the 5G
LDPC code is n ≈ 7800. The simulation results of
different shaping schemes are shown in Fig. 12, from
which we observe that the proposed hybrid shaping
can obtain extra gains of 0.2 and 1.1 dB compared to
the shaping schemes in [34] and [35], respectively.
We have also simulated the performance of the hy-
brid shaping with information length k = 8448 and

10 China Communications
 L(0) L(0) û (0)
π 01
E ,Dem A ,Dec
5G LDPC Decoder

L(1) L(1) û (1)

π11
E ,Dem A ,Dec
y HS 5G LDPC Decoder
û
Cyclic Shift Mux
Demmaper
1) 1)
L(Em,Dem
π m11
L(Am,Dec
5G LDPC Decoder
uˆ ( m1)

L(0) L(0)
A ,Dem
π0 E ,Dec

L(1) L(1)
E ,Dec
A ,Dem π1
1) 1)
L(Am,Dem L(Em,Dec
π m1
(a)

π 01

y HS π11 Bit-to- Nonbinary û

Cyclic Shift
Symbol Decoder
Demmaper

π m11

(b)

Figure 10. Two decoding schemes of the HS-MLC system. (a) The iterative multistage decoding, which requires iterations
between the decoders and the demapper. (b) The nonbinary joint decoding, which does not require iterations between the
demapper and the decoder.

SE = 3 bits/channel use
100
SE = 2.63 bits/channel use
100

10-1

10-1
FER

10-2
FER

10-2
0.85 dB
10-3
1.6 dB
10-3

10-4
18.5 19 19.5 20 20.5 21 21.5 22
10-4
15 15.5 16 16.5 17 17.5 18 18.5 19 19.5
Figure 11. Performance of the HS-BICM-ID scheme, where
the information length is set as k = 960 and the order of
Figure 12. Performance comparison with different shaping
the dyadic mapping is set as m = 5 or 6. A rate-5/6 5G
schemes, where the 5G LDPC codes of length n ≈ 7800 are
LDPC code (without information bits puncture) of length
adopted and m = 6. The spectral efficiency is kept as SE =
1152 constructed based on BG1 is adopted for CCDM shap-
2.63 bits/channel use.
ing. A rate-1/2 5G LDPC code of length 1920 is adopted
for 6-bit hybrid shaping.

China Communications 11
 SE = 3 bits/channel use SE = 2 bits/channel use
100 100

10-1 10-1
FER

FER
10-2 10-2

1.2 dB 1.7 dB
10-3 10-3

10-4 10-4
17.5 18 18.5 19 19.5 20 20.5 21 11 11.5 12 12.5 13 13.5 14 14.5 15 15.5 16

Figure 13. Performance of the HS-BICM-ID scheme, where
the information length k = 8448 and m = 6. A rate-5/6 5G
LDPC code of length 11136 is adopted for CCDM shaping.
A rate-1/2 5G LDPC code of length 16896 is adopted for
the presented 6-bit hybrid shaping scheme.
Figure 14. Performance of the HS-BICM-ID scheme, where
the information length k = 8448 and m = 6. A rate-5/6 5G
LDPC code of length 11136 is adopted for CCDM shaping.
A rate-1/3 5G LDPC code of length 25344 is adopted for
the presented 6-bit hybrid shaping scheme.

m = 6. A rate-3/4 5G LDPC code of length 11264 is 4.2 Performance Analysis of Different Spec-
adopted for the uniform input scheme and the geomet-
tral Efficiency
ric shaping scheme, and a rate-5/6 5G LDPC code of
length 11136 is adopted for CCDM shaping. A rate-
1/2 5G LDPC code of length 16896 is used for our The simulation results in Fig. 11 and Fig. 14 have also
presented 6-bit hybrid shaping scheme. The simula- shown that our hybrid shaping can more effectively
tion results are shown in Fig. 13, from which we ob- remedy the performance loss of many-to-one mapping
serve that at 2 bits/channel use compared to that at 3 bits/channel
• the proposed hybrid shaping scheme can obtain use. This can be veirified by the KL distance between
a shaping gain of about 1.2 dB compared to the the dyadic sub-optimal distribution PX∗ and the M-B
uniform input scheme; distribution PX , as shown in Table 4. It can be ob-
served that, at low and moderate spectral efficiency,
the KL distance between the dyadic distribution and
• the proposed hybrid shaping scheme can obtain the M-B distribution is relatively large, requiring our
extra gains of 0.2 and 1.0 dB compared to the hybrid shaping to further remedy the loss.
CCDM shaping and the conventional geometric
shaping, respectively;
Table 4. KL Distance Analysis of Different Spectral Efficiency for
• the proposed hybrid shaping scheme can achieve a Many-to-One Mapping m = 6
better performance compared to the dyadic prob-
abilistic shaping with many-to-one mapping. SE (bits/channel use) Code Rate D(PX∗ ||PX )
0.5 1/12 0.179
We also present the performance of hybrid shaping at
1.0 1/6 0.156
different spectral efficiency (SE = 2 bits/channel use),
1.5 1/4 0.153
which is shown in Fig. 14. From the simulation results
2.0 1/3 0.105
we can obtain that the proposed hybrid shaping can
2.5 5/12 0.058
obtain a shaping gain of about 1.7 dB compared to the
3.0 1/2 0.028
uniform scheme.

12 China Communications
 SE = 3 bits/channel use
-1
10
10-2
BER
10-3
10-4
19 19.5 20 20.5 21 21.5 22
SNR(dB)
Figure 15. Performance of the HS-MLC scheme with non-
binary joint decoding and iterative MSD, where m = 6 and
SE = 3 bits/channel use. The code of each layer is a rate-
1/2 5G LDPC code of length 1920 for the presented hy-
brid shaping scheme. A rate-3/4 5G LDPC code of length
1301 is used for the uniform input scheme and the geomet-
ric shaping scheme.
4.3 Performance of HS-MLC
In this subsection, we compare the performance be-
tween the nonbinary decoding and the iterative MSD
for the HS-MLC, where m = 6. The code of each
layer is a rate-1/2 5G LDPC code of length 1920 con-
structed based on BG2 for the 6-bit hybrid shaping
scheme. To achieve the same spectral efficiency, a
rate-3/4 5G LDPC code of length 1301 is adopted for
the uniform input scheme and the geometric shaping
scheme. For the iterative MSD decoding, the max-
imum global iteration number is Tmax = 5 and the
maximum local iteration number is Imax = 10. The
maximum iterations of the nonbinary joint decoding
is Imax = 50. The simulation results are shown in
Fig. 15, from which we observe that
• the performance of the hybrid shaping is signifi-
cantly better than the uniform and the geometric
shaping, both using the nonbinary joint decoding
algorithm;
• the performance of the nonbinary joint decod-
ing (without iterative demapping) is slightly better
than the iterative MSD (with unavoidable itera-
tive demapping) for the presented hybrid shaping
scheme.
China Communications
... ... ...
Time 0 Time 1 Time 2
(a)
... ... ...
(b)
Figure 16. The channel inputs for the time-division HS-
BICM-ID and the HS-MLC schemes. (a) The channel inputs
of the time-division HS-BICM-ID system. (b) The channel
inputs of the HS-MLC system.
4.4 Comparison of the Proposed Two Schemes
In this subsection, we show by simulation that the
HS-MLC can outperform the HS-BICM-ID when ap-
plied to a fading broadcast channel characterized by
Yt = Ht Xt + Zt , where Ht is a fading coefficient
that follows the Rayleigh distribution. We assume
that a transmitter attempts to broadcast in total Ns
symbols to m users, Ns /m for each user. One ap-
proach is to transmit Ns /m symbols in each of m time
slots (corresponding to m users), which is referred to
as the time-division HS-BICM-ID scheme. Another
approach is to employ the HS-MLC scheme, jointly
processing the information of multi-layers to obtain
Ns channel inputs. Figure. 16 shows the channel in-
puts for the time-division HS-BICM-ID scheme and
the HS-MLC scheme, where different colors represent
different users. It can be observed that, for the HS-
MLC system, an input signal contains coded bits from
all users, resulting in better tolerance to burst errors
compared to the time-division HS-BICM-ID system.
Example 7.(Performance Comparison in Fading
Channels): We present the performance of the time-
division HS-BICM-ID scheme and the HS-MLC
scheme over fast fading channels, where the fading
coefficients are known at the receiver and change in-
dependently from symbol to symbol. The signal con-
stellation is 16-PAM and m = 6. In both cases, all
users use the same rate-1/2 5G LDPC code of length
1920 constructed based on BG2. The simulation re-
sults are shown in Fig. 17. It can be seen that the HS-
MLC scheme has a significantly better performance
compared to the time-division HS-BICM-ID scheme
over fading channels.
13

100
10-1
10-2
BER
10-3
10-4
22 23 24 25 26 27
Figure 17. Performance of the time-division HS-BICM-ID
scheme and the HS-MLC scheme over fast fading channels.
In both cases, all users use the same rate-1/2 5G LDPC
code of length 1920 constructed based on BG2.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we have integrated the 5G LDPC coded
modulation with hybrid shaping, resulting in the HS-
BICM-ID and HS-MLC systems. We have achieved
significant shaping gains by elaborate designs without
introducing extra complexity compared to the dyadic
many-to-one probabilistic shaping. For HS-BICM-ID,
it can obtain shaping gains of about 0.2 dB and 1.0 dB
compared to the CCDM shaping and the geometric
shaping, respectively, while obtaining a shaping gain
of about 1.2 dB compared to the scheme with uniform
input. For HS-MLC, the performance of the nonbi-
nary joint decoding (without iterative demapping) is
slightly better than the iterative MSD algorithm. For
the proposed two schemes, the HS-MLC system has a
significantly better performance compared to the time-
division HS-BICM-ID system over fast fading chan-
nels. This work has also shown that, with many-to-
one mapping, the design of interleaver is critical, es-
pecially for unbalanced structured codes such as the
5G LDPC codes.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported by the National Key R&D
Program of China (No. 2021YFA1000500), the NSF
of China (No. 62301617 and No. 62271514),
the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Re-
search Foundation (No. 2023A1515011056)
14
and the Science, Technology and Innova-
tion Commission of Shenzhen Municipal-
ity with grant no. JCYJ20210324120002007,
and ZDSYS20210623091807023.
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15
 Jiayi Yang He is currently pursuing the
Ph.D. degree with Sun Yat-sen University,
Guangzhou, China. His research interests
include information theory, channel cod-
ing theory, and their applications to com-
munication systems.

Qianfan Wang received the Ph.D. de-

grees from Sun Yat-sen University, China,
in 2022. He is currently a Post-Doctoral
Fellow with Sun Yat-sen University. His
research interests include information the-
ory, channel coding theory, and their ap-
plications to communication systems.

Congduan Li received the B.S. degree

from the University of Science and Tech-
nology Beijing, China, in 2008, the M.S.
degree from Northern Arizona University,
AZ, USA in 2011, and Ph.D. degree from
Drexel University, PA, USA in 2015, re-
spectively, all in Electrical Engineering.
From Oct 2015 to Aug 2018, he was a
postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute of Network Coding
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and in the Department of
Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong, China. He
is currently an Associate Professor with the School of Electronics
and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China.
His research interests lie in the broad areas related with networks,
such as coding, security, wireless, storage, and caching.

Xiao Ma received the Ph.D. degree in

communication and information systems
from Xidian University, China, in 2000.
He is a Professor of the School of Com-
puter Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-
sen University, Guangzhou, China. From
2000 to 2002, he was a Post-Doctoral Fel-
low with Harvard University, Cambridge,
MA. From 2002 to 2004, he was a Research Fellow with City Uni-
versity of Hong Kong. His research interests include information
theory, channel coding theory and their applications to communi-
cation systems and digital recording systems. He is a co-recipient,
with A. Kavčić and N. Varnica, of the 2005 IEEE Best Paper
Award in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage.

16 China Communications