Design and performance evaluation of low complexity encoding methods for LDPC codes

Abstract

There is an important breakthrough in the field of forward error correction techniques, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These codes have potential to approach the Shannon limit with reliable performance on a given channel, known as the channel capacity. Recently, researchers pay much more attention towards LDPC codes because its performance is better than Turbo codes. However, the LDPC code is the best when it is an irregular code and uses with a very large block-length. Although, the short block-length LDPC codes perform not so well, they are easy to implement in various practical applications. Therefore, there is still a demand of new development on the encoding side of LDPC codes for various ranges of code rate and code length so as to capable of using in many applications.

This thesis proposes the development of quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes for column weight 3. In the first part of this thesis, we propose a new construction algorithm of QC-LDPC codes for medium to large block-length by combining QC-LDPC codes of small block-length as their component codes, via Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). Such component codes were constructed by permuting each column block sequentially to attain the desire local girth. After combining all component codes to generate an expanded parity-check matrix, the resulting girth is greater than or at least equal to the maximum girth of the component codes. Simulation results show that our proposed construction method of the parity-check matrix significantly outperforms the other well-known existing methods in terms of low error-floor, simple structure, high performance, and can reduce encoding complexity.

In addition, this thesis also proposes two new construction methods for QC-LDPC codes, namely a base matrix method and a subtraction based method. A base matrix based method is a simple, less computational complexity method for constructing the exponent matrix (3, K) of girth 8, 10 and 12 of QC-LDPC codes. Another method is a subtraction method, which has a similar exponent matrix as a base matrix method and has a girth at least 8. Results indicate that the LDPC codes constructed from these two methods have flexibility for arbitrary block-column length K and have a similar BER performance if compared to existing methods.