Advances in Mathematics of Communications
Upper bounds on the minimum distance of LDPC codes with double diagonal parity checks
François Arnault, Philippe Gaborit, Wouter Rozendaal, Nicolas Saussay, Gilles Zémor
Abstract
We investigate the minimum distance of structured binary Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes whose parity-check matrices are of the form $ [ \mathbf{C} \, \vert \, \mathbf{M}] $ where $ \mathbf{C} $ is circulant and of column weight $ 2 $, and $ \mathbf{M} $ has fixed column weight $ r \geq 3 $ and row weight at least $ 1 $. These codes are of interest because they are LDPC codes which come with a natural linear-time encoding algorithm. We show that the minimum distance of these codes is in $ O(n^{\frac{r-2}{r-1} + \epsilon}) $, where $ n $ is the code length and $ \epsilon > 0 $ is arbitrarily small. This improves the previously known upper bound in $ O(n^{\frac{r-1}{r}}) $ on the minimum distance of such codes. Additionally, we show that the new upper bound also applies to the class of repeat-accumulate codes.