On the asymptotic performance of low-complexity decoded LDPC codes with constituent hamming codes

Hamming code-based LDPC (H-LDPC) block codes are obtained by replacing single parity-check codes in Gallager’s LDPC codes with Hamming constituent codes. This paper investigates the asymptotic error-correcting capabilities of ensembles of random H-LDPC codes, used over the binary symmetric channel and decoded with a low-complexity hard-decision iterative decoding algorithm. The number of required decoding iterations is a logarithmic function of the code length. It is shown that there exist H-LDPC codes for which such an iterative decoding corrects any error pattern with a number of errors that grows linearly with the code length. For various choices of code parameters the results are supported by numerical examples.