BSTRACTIt is well known that serial belief propagation (BP) decoding for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes achieves faster convergence without any increase of decoding complexity per iteration and bit error rate (BER) performance loss than standard parallel BP (PBP) decoding. Serial BP (SBP) decoding, such as horizontal SBP (H-SBP) decoding or vertical SBP (V-SBP) decoding, updates check nodes or variable nodes faster than standard PBP decoding within a single iteration.In this paper, we propose combined horizontal-vertical SBP (CHV-SBP) decoding. By the same reasoning, CHV-SBP decoding updates check nodes or variable nodes faster than SBP decoding within a serialized step in an iteration. CHV-SBP decoding achieves faster convergence than H-SBP or V-SBP decoding. We compare these decoding schemes in details. We also show in simulations that the convergence rate, in iterations, for CHV-SBP decoding is about of that for standard PBP decoding, while the convergence rate for SBP decoding is about of that for standard PBP decoding. In simulations, we use recently proposed generalized LDPC (GLDPC) codes with binary cyclic codes (BCC).