Instantons causing iterative decoding to cycle

Abstract: It is speculated that the most probable channel noise realizations (instantons) that cause the iterative decoding of low-density parity-check codes to fail make the decoding not to converge. The Wiberg's formula is generalized for the case when the part of a computational tree that contributes to the output at its center is ambiguous. Two methods of finding the instantons for large number of iterations are presented and tested on Tanner's [155, 64, 20] code and Gaussian channel. The inherently dynamic instanton with effective distance of 11.475333 is found.