Construction of well-structured quasi-cyclic low-density parity check codes

Two classes of well-structured binary low-density parity check codes (LDPC) are described. The first class is based on a branch of combinatorial mathematics, known as the balanced incomplete block design (BIBD). Construction of three types of codes derived from BIBD designs is illustrated in addition to a family of LDPC codes constructed by decomposition of incidence matrices of the proposed BIBD designs. The decomposition technique reduces the density of the parity check matrix and hence reduces the number of short cycles, which generally lead to better performing LDPC codes. The second class of well-structured LDPC codes, Vandermonde or array LDPC codes, are defined by a small number of parameters and cover a large set of code lengths and rates with different column weights. The presented LDPC codes are quasi-cyclic with no cycles of length four; hence simple encoding while maintaining good performance is achieved. Furthermore, the codes are compared with known random LDPC codes, in order to assess their relative achievable performance/complexity trade-offs. It is shown that well-structured LDPC codes perform very similar to the known random LDPC codes.