The paper presents two classes of quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes which perform close to the Shannon limit. The construction of these codes is based on decomposition of circulant matrices constructed from finite geometries.
This paper is concerned with construction and structural analysis of both cyclic and quasi-cyclic codes, particularly low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. It consists of three parts. The first part shows that a cyclic code given by a parity-check matrix in circulant form can be decomposed into descendant cyclic and quasi-cyclic codes of various lengths and rates. Some fundamental structural properties of these descendant codes are developed, including the characterization of the roots of the generator polynomial of a cyclic descendant code. The second part of the paper shows that cyclic and quasi-cyclic descendant LDPC codes can be derived from cyclic finite-geometry LDPC codes using the results developed in the first part of the paper. This enlarges the repertoire of cyclic LDPC codes. The third part of the paper analyzes the trapping set structure of regular LDPC codes whose parity-check matrices satisfy a certain constraint on their rows and columns. Several classes of finite-geometry and finite-field cyclic and quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with large minimum distances are shown to have no harmful trapping sets of size smaller than their minimum distances. Consequently, their error-floor performances are dominated by their minimum distances.
This paper shows that a cyclic code can be put into quasi-cyclic form by decomposing a circular parity-check matrix through column and row permutations. Such a decomposition of a circular parity-check matrix of a cyclic code produces a group of shorter cyclic or quasi-cyclic codes and leads to a new method for constructing long cyclic codes from short cyclic codes. Also in this paper, new classes of cyclic and quasi-cyclic LDPC codes are derived from cyclic Euclidean geometry LDPC codes by decomposing their circular parity-check matrices. These new LDPC codes perform well and enlarge the repertoire of cyclic and quasi-cyclic LDPC codes.
This correspondence presents three algebraic methods for constructing low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These methods are based on the structural properties of finite geometries. The first method gives a class of Gallager codes and a class of complementary Gallager codes. The second method results in two classes of circulant-LDPC codes, one in cyclic form and the other in quasi-cyclic form. The third method is a two-step hybrid method. Codes in these classes have a wide range of rates and minimum distances, and they perform well with iterative decoding.
Low density parity check (LDPC) codes with iterative decoding based on belief propagation (IDBP) achieve astonishing error performance close to the Shannon limit. Until now there has been no known method for constructing these Shannon limit approaching codes systematically. Good LDPC codes are largely generated by computer search. As a result, the encoding of long LDPC codes is in general very complex. This paper presents the first algebraic method for constructing LDPC codes systematically based on finite analytic geometries. Four classes of finite geometry LDPC codes with relatively good minimum distances are constructed. These codes are either cyclic or quasi-cyclic and therefore their encoding can be implemented with simple linear feedback shift registers. Long finite geometry LDPC codes have been constructed and they achieve an error performance only a few tenths of a dB away from the Shannon limit. Finite geometry LDPC codes are strong competitors to turbo codes for error control in communication and digital data storage systems.
In this correspondence we present a special class of quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes, called block-type LDPC (B-LDPC) codes, which have an efficient encoding algorithm due to the simple structure of their parity-check matrices. Since the parity-check matrix of a QC-LDPC code consists of circulant permutation matrices or the zero matrix, the required memory for storing it can be significantly reduced, as compared with randomly constructed LDPC codes. We show that the girth of a QC-LDPC code is upper-bounded by a certain number which is determined by the positions of circulant permutation matrices. The B-LDPC codes are constructed as irregular QC-LDPC codes with parity-check matrices of an almost lower triangular form so that they have an efficient encoding algorithm, good noise threshold, and low error floor. Their encoding complexity is linearly scaled regardless of the size of circulant permutation matrices.