Decoding of quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with section-wise cyclic structure

Presented in this paper is a reduced-complexity iterative decoding scheme for quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes. This decoding scheme is devised based on the section-wise cyclic structure of the parity-check matrix of a QC-LDPC code. Using this decoding scheme, the hardware implementation complexity of a QC-LDPC decoder can be significantly reduced without performance degradation. A high-rate QC-LDPC code that can achieve a very low error-rate without a visible error-floor is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed decoding scheme. Also presented in this paper are two other high-rate QC-LDPC codes and a method for constructing rate -1/2 QC-LDPC codes whose Tanner graphs have girth 8. All the codes constructed perform well with low error-floor using the proposed decoding scheme.