  We describe a family of instanton-based optimization methods developed
recently for the analysis of the error floors of low-density parity-check
(LDPC) codes. Instantons are the most probable configurations of the channel
noise which result in decoding failures. We show that the general idea and the
respective optimization technique are applicable broadly to a variety of
channels, discrete or continuous, and variety of sub-optimal decoders.
Specifically, we consider: iterative belief propagation (BP) decoders, Gallager
type decoders, and linear programming (LP) decoders performing over the
additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGNC) and the binary symmetric channel
(BSC).
  The instanton analysis suggests that the underlying topological structures of
the most probable instanton of the same code but different channels and
decoders are related to each other. Armed with this understanding of the
graphical structure of the instanton and its relation to the decoding failures,
we suggest a method to construct codes whose Tanner graphs are free of these
structures, and thus have less significant error floors.
