A new parity structure with multi-weight circulants for QC LDPC codes

Abstract

The block dual-diagonal (BDD) parity structure is widely adopted in many practical irregular quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These QC LDPC codes have good error-correcting performance in waterfall region but usually show relatively high error floors in low error rate region. In this paper, by using multi-weight circulants, a new BDD structure is proposed for the parity part of irregular QC LDPC codes to lower error floors and support efficient encoding. Since the parity part of parity-check matrices has flexible degree distribution with the aid of multi-weight circulants, QC LDPC codes with the proposed BDD structure can have large minimum Hamming distance compared to those with the conventional BDD structure, especially, in the low-rate case. Simulation results show that QC LDPC codes with the proposed BDD structure have lower error floor than those with the conventional BDD structure.