Optimized Construction of Short and High Rate Protograph QC-LDPC Codes

Abstract

To obtain efficient and pragmatic channel codes high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), an optimized construction of short and high rate protograph quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is presented. Based on an optimized protograph template, the code framework is firstly produced by the extensions of the variable nodes. By enlarging the dimension of the sub-matrices related to the protograph framework, the base quasi-cyclic (QC) matrix is generated with required code rate and length. Then, the elements in the base matrix are split with even smaller square sub-matrices of the same row and column weights. In this procedure, a progressive edge growth (PEG) algorithm is employed to find the optimized positions of the QC submatrices, which brings larger girth for better code performance. Also the circulant offsets in all QC sub-matrices are optimally searched by a QC improved approximated cycle extrinsic message degree (QCI-ACE) algorithm, which improves the relationship of the unavoidable loops in the code's Tanner graph and thus it improves the error floor. Simulation results show that the codes produced by the proposed method demonstrate quite good bit error rate (BER) performance. In addition, they exhibit good properties of high spectrum efficiency by the high code rate, as well as the low complexity by the short code length. Therefore, the proposed code construction can be efficiently applied in the design of short and high rate protograph QC-LDPC codes with high rate and rational complexity.