Quasi-Cyclic Codes

Quasi-cyclic codes form an important class of algebraic codes that includes cyclic codes as a special subclass. This chapter focuses on the algebraic structure of quasi-cyclic codes, first. Based on these structural properties, some asymptotic results, a few minimum distance bounds and further applications such as the trace representation and characterization of certain subfamilies of quasi-cyclic codes are elaborated. This survey will appear as a chapter in "A Concise Encyclopedia of Coding Theory" to be published by CRC Press.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1906.0496

Hierarchical and High-Girth QC LDPC Codes

We present a general approach to designing capacity-approaching high-girth low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes that are friendly to hardware implementation. Our methodology starts by defining a new class of "hierarchical" quasi-cyclic (HQC) LDPC codes that generalizes the structure of quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes. Whereas the parity check matrices of QC LDPC codes are composed of circulant sub-matrices, those of HQC LDPC codes are composed of a hierarchy of circulant sub-matrices that are in turn constructed from circulant sub-matrices, and so on, through some number of levels. We show how to map any class of codes defined using a protograph into a family of HQC LDPC codes. Next, we present a girth-maximizing algorithm that optimizes the degrees of freedom within the family of codes to yield a high-girth HQC LDPC code. Finally, we discuss how certain characteristics of a code protograph will lead to inevitable short cycles, and show that these short cycles can be eliminated using a "squashing" procedure that results in a high-girth QC LDPC code, although not a hierarchical one. We illustrate our approach with designed examples of girth-10 QC LDPC codes obtained from protographs of one-sided spatially-coupled codes.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information THeor

A tight upper bound on the number of non-zero weights of a quasi-cyclic code

Let $\mathcal{C}$ be a quasi-cyclic code of index $l(l\geq2)$. Let $G$ be the subgroup of the automorphism group of $\mathcal{C}$ generated by $\rho^l$ and the scalar multiplications of $\mathcal{C}$, where $\rho$ denotes the standard cyclic shift. In this paper, we find an explicit formula of orbits of $G$ on $\mathcal{C}\setminus \{\mathbf{0}\}$. Consequently, an explicit upper bound on the number of non-zero weights of $\mathcal{C}$ is immediately derived and a necessary and sufficient condition for codes meeting the bound is exhibited. In particular, we list some examples to show the bounds are tight. Our main result improves and generalizes some of the results in \cite{M2}

Construction of Quasi-Cyclic Product Codes

Linear quasi-cyclic product codes over finite fields are investigated. Given the generating set in the form of a reduced Gr{\"o}bner basis of a quasi-cyclic component code and the generator polynomial of a second cyclic component code, an explicit expression of the basis of the generating set of the quasi-cyclic product code is given. Furthermore, the reduced Gr{\"o}bner basis of a one-level quasi-cyclic product code is derived.Comment: 10th International ITG Conference on Systems, Communications and Coding (SCC), Feb 2015, Hamburg, German