Full diversity NB-LDPC coding with non-binary repetition symbols over the block-fading channel

In this paper we propose a flexible coding scheme that achieves full diversity over the block-fading channel. The particularity of our approach is to rely on non-binary LDPC codes coupled with multiplicative non-binary codes, so that to easily adapt the coding rate to the number of fading blocks. A simple combining strategy is used at the receiver end before the iterative decoding, so that decoding can be performed on the same mother code. As a consequence, the decoding complexity is the same irrespectively of the number of fading blocks. Moreover, we propose an optimization of the non-binary multiplicative coefficients according to the Euclidian distance between the constellation points. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique yields to a close-to-outage performance, with significant gains with respect to the binary LDPC codes from the literature.