  A sequential updating scheme (SUS) for belief propagation (BP) decoding of
LDPC codes over Galois fields, $GF(q)$, and correlated Markov sources is
proposed, and compared with the standard parallel updating scheme (PUS). A
thorough experimental study of various transmission settings indicates that the
convergence rate, in iterations, of the BP algorithm (and subsequently its
complexity) for the SUS is about one half of that for the PUS, independent of
the finite field size $q$. Moreover, this 1/2 factor appears regardless of the
correlations of the source and the channel's noise model, while the error
correction performance remains unchanged. These results may imply on the
'universality' of the one half convergence speed-up of SUS decoding.
