Construction of Structured Regular LDPC Codes: A Design-Theoretic Approach

A new combinatorial technique for constructing girth-6 structured binary regular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes based on special types of t-designs is given. A very large number of well-known t-designs can be used by this method for code construction. Based on this method, a t-(v,k,λ) design D=(X,B) can be exploited for code construction if it satisfies the following three conditions: 1) |_B1 ∩ B₂|≤ t for any two blocks B₁,B₂∈ B and B₁ ≠ B₂; 2) λ>1; and 3) k>t. Though the technique works for any t-design satisfying these conditions, we focus only on the utilization of simple triple systems, super-simple BIBDs, Steiner systems, and large sets (LSs) of t-designs. We also construct binary and non-binary girth-6 QC-LDPC codes from the t-designs satisfying these conditions by using matrix dispersion method. Experimental results show that the constructed non-binary QC-LDPC codes can provide good practical performance under iterative decoding using the fast Fourier transform based q-ary sum-product algorithm (FFT-QSPA) and they can achieve acceptable coding gains over random-like codes of comparable parameters decoded with sum-product algorithm (SPA).