Construction of irregular LDPC codes based on Balanced Incomplete Block Designs

In this paper, we present a method to design irregular structured low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes based on balanced incomplete block designs (BIBD). The problem of designing irregular structured LDPC codes that have good overall error performance for a wide range of code rates and block sizes with attractive storage requirements is attempted. The proposed codes are well structured and unlike random codes can lend themselves to a very low-complexity implementation. The codes constructed by this method have the girth at least 6 and they perform well with the sum-product iterative decoding algorithm. Furthermore, the codes are compared with known random LDPC codes, in order to assess their relative achievable performance. The proposed LDPC codes demonstrate performance that is better than an average random LDPC code of similar block length, code rate and parity check matrix sparsity.