Construction of Near-Optimum Burst Erasure Correcting Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

In this paper, a simple, general-purpose and effective tool for the design of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for iterative correction of bursts of erasures is presented. The design method consists in starting from the parity-check matrix of an LDPC code and developing an optimized parity-check matrix, with the same performance on the memory-less erasure channel, and suitable also for the iterative correction of single bursts of erasures. The parity-check matrix optimization is performed by an algorithm called pivot searching and swapping (PSS) algorithm, which executes permutations of carefully chosen columns of the parity-check matrix, after a local analysis of particular variable nodes called stopping set pivots. This algorithm can be in principle applied to any LDPC code. If the input parity-check matrix is designed for achieving good performance on the memory-less erasure channel, then the code obtained after the application of the PSS algorithm provides good joint correction of independent erasures and single erasure bursts. Numerical results are provided in order to show the effectiveness of the PSS algorithm when applied to different categories of LDPC codes.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. IEEE Trans. on Communications, accepted (submitted in Feb. 2007

Circulant Arrays on Cyclic Subgroups of Finite Fields: Rank Analysis and Construction of Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Codes

This paper consists of three parts. The first part presents a large class of new binary quasi-cyclic (QC)-LDPC codes with girth of at least 6 whose parity-check matrices are constructed based on cyclic subgroups of finite fields. Experimental results show that the codes constructed perform well over the binary-input AWGN channel with iterative decoding using the sum-product algorithm (SPA). The second part analyzes the ranks of the parity-check matrices of codes constructed based on finite fields with characteristic of 2 and gives combinatorial expressions for these ranks. The third part identifies a subclass of constructed QC-LDPC codes that have large minimum distances. Decoding of codes in this subclass with the SPA converges very fast.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE Transaction on Communication