Design of good quasi-cyclic LDPC codes

The existing design of quasi-cyclic(QC) low-density parity-check(LDPC) codes has not considered the problems of short length girths and the rows' dependency.The first problem leads to the BER performance of QC LDPC codes to be much poorer than that of randomly constructed LDPC codes,while the second problem leads to the difficulty of construction of generator matrices from parity-check matrices.To solve the first problem,the constraint conditions for designing the QC LDPC codes are proposed,and the dimension and shift factors of the circulant matrices of the given sparse parity-check matrix are adjusted according to the test results of both girth 4 and girth 6.To solve the second problem,an approach of irregular QC LDPC codes is proposed.The proposed approach is to replace some sub-matrices by zero matrices and identity matrices at special positions in the given sparse parity-check matrix so as to get a nonsingular square matrix for the construction of the generator matrix.Though adopting bidiagonal submatrices in parity-check matrix can solve the rows' dependency problem,many code words with low weights will occur,which leads to the BER performance can not be better by increasing code lengths.Examples are provided for the proposed design of QC LDPC codes,and computer simulation results show that the proposed QC LDPC codes achieve good BER performance.