Terminated LDPC convolutional codes over GF(2p)

In this paper, we present a construction method of terminated non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes. Our construction method is an expansion of Felstrom and Zigangirov construction [1] for non-binary LDPC convolutional codes. The rate-compatibility of the non-binary LDPC convolutional codes is also discussed. The proposed rate-compatible code is designed from one single mother (2,4)-regular non-binary LDPC convolutional code of rate 1/2. Higher-rate codes are produced by puncturing the mother code and lower-rate codes are produced by multiplicatively repeating the mother code. For moderate values of the syndrome former memory, simulation results show that mother non-binary LDPC convolutional code outperform binary LDPC convolutional codes with comparable constraint bit length. And the derived low-rate and high-rate non-binary LDPC convolutional codes exhibit good decoding performance without loss of large gap to the Shannon limits.