3 - Low-density parity-check codes: properties and constructions

Summary

Introduction

The construction of binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes simply involves replacing a small number of the values in an all-zeros matrix by 1s in such a way that the rows and columns have the required degree distribution. In many cases, randomly allocating the entries in H will produce a reasonable LDPC code. However, the construction of H can affect the performance of the sum–product decoder, significantly so for some codes, and also the implementation complexity of the code.

While there is no one recipe for a “good” LDPC code, there are a number of principles that inform the code designer. The first obvious decisions are which degree distribution to choose and how to construct the matrix with the chosen degrees, i.e. pseudo-randomly or with some sort of structure. Whichever construction is chosen, the features to consider include the girth of the Tanner graph and the minimum distance of the code.

In this chapter we will discuss those properties of an LDPC code that affect its iterative decoding performance and then present the common construction methods used to produce codes with the preferred properties. Following common practice in the field we will call the selection of the degree distributions for an LDPC code code design and the methods to assign the locations in the parity-check matrix for the 1 entries code construction.