Design of rate-compatible efficiently-encodable generalized LDPC codes

We study rate-compatible (RC) puncturing algorithms for efficiently-encodable (EE) generalized LDPC (GLDPC) codes of short-to-moderate blocklength. EE-GLDPC codes are systematic codes and well-suited for puncturing, thus they are able to address a rate constraint issue, which is an obvious disadvantage of traditional GLDPC codes. In this work, we propose systematic puncturing algorithms for EE-GLDPC codes. Simulation results show that the systematic puncturing has considerable performance improvement over random puncturing. In addition, the punctured codes, like their mother codes, have the advantage of good error floor performance, which can be a very important feature in practical applications. Finally, it is also demonstrated that, compared with LDPC codes, GLDPC codes have a better error floor performance, but suffer from a decoding threshold loss at high puncturing rates; nonetheless the tradeoff between error floor and decoding threshold loss can be conveniently implemented via the method of doping.