Structured Nonbinary Rate-Compatible Low-Density Parity-Check Codes

While existing works on rate-compatible low-density parity-check (RC-LDPC) codes, either binary or nonbinary, all focus on random-like construction, we in this letter present a novel method to construct structured nonbinary RC-LDPC codes. Protograph-based design with structured puncturing is applied while numerical simulation of code performance is adopted for optimization. The resultant codes are qualified as nonbinary quasi-cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) codes which are amenable to high-speed implementation of encoder/decoder. Numerical results show that the proposed codes achieve very good performance.