Approaching capacity with asymptotically regular LDPC codes

We present a family of protograph based LDPC codes that can be derived from permutation matrix based regular (J,K) LDPC convolutional codes by termination. In the terminated protograph, all variable nodes still have degree J but some check nodes at the start and end of the protograph have degrees smaller than K. Since the fraction of these stronger nodes vanishes as the termination length L increases, we call the codes asymptotically regular. The density evolution thresholds of these protographs are better than those of regular (J, K) block codes. Interestingly, this threshold improvement gets stronger with increasing node degrees (at a fixed rate) and it does not decay as L increases. Terminated convolutional protographs can also be derived from standard irregular protographs and may exhibit a significant threshold improvement.