Trapping sets of structured LDPC codes

THIS PAPER IS ELIGIBLE FOR THE STUDENT PAPER AWARD. This paper analyzes trapping set structure of binary regular LDPC codes whose parity-check matrices satisfy the constraint that no two rows (or two columns) have more than one place where they both have non-zero components, which is called row-column (RC) constraint. For a (γ,ρ)-regular LDPC code whose parity-check matrix satisfies the RC-constraint, its Tanner graph contains no (κ, τ) trapping set with size κ ≤ γ and number τ of odd degree check nodes less than γ. For several classes of RC-constrained regular LDPC codes constructed algebraically, we show that their Tanner graphs contain no trapping sets of sizes smaller than their minimum weights.