Encoder and decoder are the two most important and complex components of a wireless transceiver. Traditionally, dedicated hardware solutions are used because of their computational intensive algorithms. This paper presents an alternative software-based solution that has several advantages over dedicated hardware solutions. LDPC codes are chosen for their excellent error correcting performance and cell processor is chosen for its tremendous computational power. Sparse and structural properties of LDPC codes are exploited to reduce computation and memory requirements. Several optimization techniques suitable to cell processor architecture such as multi-threading, vectorization, loop unrolling are used to improve performance. The proposed solution achieved significant performance improvement over existing software and dedicated hardware solutions. © 2012 Springer India Pvt. Ltd.