New LDPC Codes Based on Serial Concatenation

We propose a novel family of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes that can be obtained as the serial concatenation of very simple components. Codes designed through the proposed approach exhibit very good performance and have a number of benefits, as high flexibility in length and rate and low complexity encoding. In addition, the systematic form of the component codes ensures rate compatibility, so the proposed codes are suitable for application in type-II hybrid automatic repeat request schemes. We analyze their properties through theoretical arguments and give design examples in order to assess their performance.