An Improvement of the PEG Algorithm for LDPC Codes in the Waterfall Region

There exist many different algorithms to construct good low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. To maximize the girth of the bipartite graph, which represents the LDPC code, the progressive edge-growth (PEG) algorithm was introduced. This construction methods leads for irregular LDPC codes to a lower error floor, but also to a performance loss in the waterfall region compared with randomly constructed LDPC codes. In this paper, we describe a modification of the PEG algorithm that improves the performance in the waterfall region. Furthermore, this modified PEG algorithm yields codes with lower error floors and a slightly better performance in the waterfall region than randomly constructed LDPC codes