Iterative decoding of a class of cyclic codes

Among the classes of LDPC codes that have been constructed and designed, the only class of LDPC codes that are cyclic is the class of codes constructed based on the incidence vectors of lines of finite geometries, called finite geometry LDPC codes. Cyclic finite geometry LDPC codes are known to have large minimum distances and can provide good error performance with very low error-floors using iterative decoding based on belief propagation. Their cyclic structure allows them to be efficiently and systematically encoded with simple shift-registers in linear time with linear complexity. An obvious question is whether, besides cyclic finite geometry LDPC codes, there are other cyclic codes with large minimum distances that can be efficiently decoded iteratively using channel soft information. In this paper, we present one such class of cyclic codes. Codes in this class are two-step majority-logic decodable and they are also constructed based on finite geometries. Two iterative decoding algorithms are devised for this class of cyclic codes and they provide significant coding gain over the two-step majority-logic decoding of codes in this class.