Trade-Based LDPC Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel trade-based construction method for LDPC codes, improving the design of quasi-cyclic and spatially-coupled LDPC codes by reducing complexity and enhancing minimum distance bounds.

Contribution

The paper presents a new trade-based approach to construct parity-check matrices for LDPC codes, enabling simpler exponent matrix construction and better bounds on lifting degrees.

Findings

Constructed QC-LDPC codes with smaller lower bounds on lifting degree.

Developed a method for time-varying SC-LDPC codes using trade matrices.

Demonstrated improved code properties through numerical and simulation results.

Abstract

LDPC codes based on multiple-edge protographs potentially have larger minimum distances compared to their counterparts, single-edge protographs. However, considering different features of their Tanner graph, such as short cycles, girth and other graphical structures, is harder than for Tanner graphs from single-edge protographs. In this paper, we provide a novel approach to construct the parity-check matrix of an LDPC code which is based on trades obtained from block designs. We employ our method to construct two important categories of LDPC codes; quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC and spatially-coupled LDPC (SC-LDPC) codes. We use those trade-based matrices to define base matrices of multiple-edge protographs. The construction of exponent matrices corresponding to these base matrices has less complexity compared to the ones proposed in the literature. We prove that these base matrices result in QC-LDPC codes with smaller lower bounds on the lifting degree than existing ones. There are three categories of SC-LDPC codes: periodic, time-invariant and time-varying. Constructing the parity-check matrix of the third one is more difficult because of the time dependency in the parity-check matrix. We use a trade-based matrix to obtain the parity-check matrix of a time-varying SC-LDPC code in which each downwards row displacement of the trade-based matrix yields syndrome matrices of a particular time. Combining the different row shifts the whole parity-check matrix is obtained. Our proposed method to construct parity-check and base matrices from trade designs is applicable to any type of super-simple directed block designs. We apply our technique to directed designs with smallest defining sets containing at least half of the blocks. To demonstrate the significance of our contribution, we provide a number of numerical and simulation results.